“This is the most interesting and original study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture that I have read in years. In the wake of Manly Love, the field will never look quite the same. Nissen has trumped nearly every other scholar in recapturing and elucidating some fundamental patterns of American Victorian culture. His engaging, even suspenseful, book transported me into those times more fully than anything I know from outside the period itself, such that his insights attain an emotional as well as intellectual force. This book deserves a sustained standing ovation.”

John W. Crowley, University of Alabama

“Manly Love uncovers amazing examples of male romantic friendship in literary classics as well as in hitherto lost literary gems. It is the first comprehensive history of love between men as it was reflected in nineteenth-century American fiction. Axel Nissen engagingly and definitively challenges the historical amnesia which assumes that the transatlantic uproar over the Oscar Wilde case represented the whole story of the American Victorian response to male homoeroticism.”

Lillian Faderman, author of Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

"Nissen combines historical contextualization with fresh readings of the novels’ identity formations and cultural work in reflecting and defining acceptable masculine intimacies across the homo-social/homosexual divide. In so doing, he offers new angles on familiar texts and the cultural myths that surround them."

Choice

"Manly Love is a pleasure to read, full of insights that go beyond the analyses of individual works. . . . [The] book drives home the point that love and friendship between males, with or without sex, is a crucial component of the human experience."

John Lauritsen | Gay and Lesbian Review