Blake Piel

Thesis Title: The Making of the Modernist Man: Virtue, Selfhood, and Masculinity in American Literature, 1919-1939

Supervisor: Professor Nicholas Gaskill

My research explores conceptions and representations of masculinity in American literary modernism. I consider novels and poetry by Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Hart Crane through early twentieth-century philosophical accounts of identity and morality. I examine the possibilities that literary modernism, as a space of experimentation, offers for reimagining virtuous manhood amid societal transformations such as industrialization, secularization, war, and shifts in gender norms and notions of selfhood.