1st Edition

Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy Gender as Genre

By John Alberti Copyright 2013
    124 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    136 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films.  Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic comedies as examples of experimentation and change towards narratives that feature more egalitarian and less essentialist constructions of gender.

    1. Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender and/as Genre  2. "'I Love You, Man': Gender Genre Instability in the Bromance"  3. The Emergence of the Anxious Romance:Mumblecore, Neorealism, and Gender Play  4. Greenberg: The Anxious Romance and the Future(s) of the Romantic Comedy

    Biography

    John Alberti is Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies at Northern Kentucky University, USA.