Introduction: Making America White Male Again

This introduction situates the book’s study of six novels by American and Canadian authors amidst current scholarship on nostalgia, critical whiteness and masculinity studies, and literary white male protagonists. As demonstrated by these novels and by the central slogan in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, “Make America Great Again,” xenophobic, white nationalist appeals have long stoked white male emotions, in part by evoking a mythical past in which white male power reigned without challenge. Spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, the novels examined in  White Male Nostalgia  provide adept, representative diagnoses of the contemporary white male psyche, demonstrating that a hyper-individualized masculine identity is ironically grounded in the collective subjugation of others and that white male nostalgia commonly takes at least five different forms.