Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
5 - Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Men are not born … to follow a predetermined biological imperative … To be a man is to participate in social life as a man, as a gendered being. Men are not born; they are made.
This essay concerns the representation of masculinities in three of the five novels by John Buchan that have as their protagonist his adventure hero Richard Hannay, beginning with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and proceeding through Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919). These novels are denominated Buchan’s ‘War Trilogy’ because in their chronological dramatic time they move from the inception of the First World War to its engulfment. This essay concentrates on these three novels because the martial contexts deploy a higher valence and intensification of masculinities. Buchan himself labelled these novels ‘shockers’ because of their high quotient of exciting, breathless incident. They are, however, far more. These ‘War Trilogy’ texts have a palimpsestic basic structural template. Hannay confronts a series of male or female ‘others’ who constitute antagonism to him and to his ideologies: the Black Stone in The Thirty-Nine Steps; von Stumm, von Einem and Kaiser Wilhelm II in Greenmantle; and Graf von Schwabing/Moxon Ivery in Mr Standfast. In pursuit of his objectives, Hannay has a group of supporters, consisting of Peter Pienaar, the old Boer scout; Sandy Arbuthnot, a junior member of the Scottish aristocracy; John Scantlebury Blenkiron, an American from Indiana, who has the dual careers of secret agent and businessman; and Mary Lamington, a secret-service agent, Hannay’s handler in Mr Standfast and eventual wife.
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- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity , pp. 81 - 96Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014