"Spectres of Men: Masculinity, Crisis and British Literature" offers an analysis of the various ways in which hegemonic masculinity has been constructed, contested, and preserved in selected works of British literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. The dominant image of manhood that prevails at a given time is examined on the basis of male-authored fiction and a selection of political, philosophical, social, and critical writings by men. By focusing on works by and about men, this book traces the changing connections between masculinity and such concepts as heroic labour or literary production, and describes some of the processes of othering that have been crucial to the formation of the successive models of manhood. A key element in these processes is the figure of the spectre, whose re-appearance disturbs the linearity of time and history, but also makes their movement possible since it is only by recognising the spectre as an effective component of the present that the new, always harboured in the old, may begin.