White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature

White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature charts the late twentieth-century development of reactionary emotions commonly felt by resentful, yet often goodhearted white men. Examining an eclectic array of literary case studies in light of recent work in critical whiteness and masculinity studies, history, geography, philosophy and theology, Tim Engles delineates five preliminary forms of white male nostalgia-as dramatized in novels by Sloan Wilson, Richard Wright, Carol Shields, Don DeLillo, Louis Begley and Margaret Atwood-demonstrating how literary fiction can help us understand the inner workings of deluded dominance. These authors write from identities outside the defensive domain of normalized white masculinity, demonstrating via extended interior dramas that although nostalgia is primarily thought of as an emotion felt by individuals, it also works to shore up entrenched collective power. Tim Engles is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA, specializing in multicultural literature and critical whiteness studies. He has co-edited Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (2000) and Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise (2006) and his recent publications address the work of Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien and Walter Dean Myers, as well as systemic racism in the criminal justice system and racialized social media slacktivism. Table of Contents   1          Introduction: Making America White Male Again                         Common White Male Dispositions                         Forms of White Male Nostalgia 2          Ethnicized White Male Nostalgia: Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit                         White Anglo-Saxonism                         Resurgent White Anglo-Saxonism                         Empathetic Black Embodiment and White Male Emotional Constipation                         The Ethnicist Presence                         Pseudo-feudal Nostalgia 3          Moralizing White Male Nostalgia: Richard Wright's Savage Holiday                         White Male Histories                         Purified White Male Bodies                         The White Male Death Drive 4          Spatialized White Male Nostalgia: Carol Shields's Happenstance                         Contexts for Happenstance An Unwittingly White Male Historian                         Communally Cognizant Reflective Nostalgia                         Dehistoricized Land                         Geographical Space and White Male Mobility                       5          Denying White Male Nostalgia: Don DeLillo's Underworld                         The Relational Underpinnings of Cold War White Masculinity                         Reflective Nostalgia and Communal Art                         White-male Pattern Deafness                         Masculinized Isolation and Feminized Community 6          Possessive White Male Nostalgia: Louis Begley's About Schmidt                         Entitled White Masculinity                         Sovereign WASP Masculinity                         Nostalgic White World-traveling                         The White Manchild                         Repressed White Male Shame 7          Epilogue: Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last and the Futures of Domineering White Masculinity