Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship - New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature and Culture

This monograph project explores 'new' constructions and discourses of masculinity in contemporary German literature and culture. Masculinity has been a thorny issue in the German cultural imagination, not least since National Socialism. Building on recent scholarship about the historical, social, and literary phenomenon of the masculine, this book focusses on the question of how native German notions of masculinity are contested and re-evaluated in literature and films primarily by ethnically and culturally non-German authors and filmmakers. It engages with the interaction between conceptions of the masculine with those of nationality and ethnicity, taking the period surrounding the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/1990 and the recent turn of the millennium with their significant social, political, and demographic changes as crucial junctures in the reconsideration of both nationality and masculinity in a German-speaking context. The focus on these spaces of time and their repercussions on Germany lead to a reconsideration of how the local interacts with the global. This is of particular significance in a world where people increasingly intermingle yet appear to nourish a desire to differentiate themselves from a 'globalised mass'. Through the lens of masculinity, the book explores a nation that is (still) (re)defining itself in interaction with its 'others'.