Books by Joseph A. Kestner

Making use of masculinity theories, this title focuses on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Beginning with works published in the 1880s, it engages tales involving initiation and rites of passage, experiences with the non-Western Other, colonial contexts and sexual encounters.

This study examines the construction of masculinity in culture based on an analysis of pictorial representations of the male in many contexts: social; historical; legal; literary; institutional; anthropological; educational; marital; imperial; and aesthetic. Artists featured include Burne-Jones.

This study concentrates on the implications of the emergence of the female detective during the Victorian and early Edwardian periods. The author draws attention to the many social conventions that would label women detectives as having too transgressive a quality for the period.