The Injured Man – Made and Unmade:
Physical Trauma and Masculinities in Britain and America from the Fin de Siècle to the Post-War Period

Abstract

This thesis considers the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, W. H. Davies, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, exploring how each writer uses physical damage to the male body as a vehicle through which cultural concerns with models of masculinity can be exercised; and these models differ, given the fourty-five year gap between the publication date of the first novel examined (Treasure Island, 1883) and that of Chapter 3’s primary focus, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The breadth of this timeframe allows for a comprehensive study of somatically damaged men at crucial periods in British history and, in the case of the post-war period, of Anglo-American culture as a whole.
Many of the injured bodies focused upon in this thesis have received plentiful scholarly attention, yet there remains an absence of critical material which places these bodies as a central facet of their respective texts, rather than as supplementary motifs. This study pays particular attention to the importance of these bodies with regards to masculine identity, offering a fresh insight into the works of the aforementioned authors.