The great bulk of work on gender in fiction and literature has reflected feminist concerns and focused on women authors. This work attempts to extend the contemporary preoccupation with representations of gender into the terrain of masculinity and male writing. Drawing on work in both the social sciences and humanities, it explores the narrative representation of masculinity in selected 20th-century fictions ranging from classic texts by Lawrence and Conrad to novels by John Fowles, Graham Swift, David Leavitt and others.