Thanks for learning the in-artime podcast. For more details about in-artime and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, Ernest Hemingway wrote in the Old Man and the Sea. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

In a time when traditional male roles have been systematically challenged, it's a sentiment that seems to come from a stranger distant past.

And the mature man that inhabit certain strands of fiction today can seem a world away from Hemingway's heroes, although we mustn't forget James Bond and the Godfather.

But there has been a change in the last century in literary fiction. Are the ideals of masculinity that underlie the portrayal of men by today's authors so very different from the images of men from earlier in the 20th century?

And is there a British literary ideal of man that is a dodged with its American counterpart?

With me to discuss masculinity in literature is a novelist Martin Amis, author of Money, Success and the Information. He's currently working on a memoir of his father.

And the feminist cultural critic Cora Kaplan, whose professor of English at Southampton University.

My name is Sartre Liu. Can you give us a paragraph or two an overview of the last 75 years, the way you see it in literary fiction?

Well, I suppose I can, although one generalizes here with trepidation because literature is about special cases rather than the sociological norm.

But I would say that the idea of masculinity in the novel in this century is a tale of domesticization.

The male is getting house trained in this century. The strong individualisms that you see around the turn of the century are heading towards something a bit more homogenized, I would say.

In less serious fiction, you see the kind of cute accommodating male that is almost a sitcom character, the new man who has a kind of feminist policeman or police woman looking over his shoulder.

And while, of course, in literary novel, there's nothing quite as abject as that.

I think that all writers my age have certainly made, had to square themselves with feminism and have benefited from it.

Cora Kaplan, would you agree with that?

Well, I certainly think second wave feminism has been a sort of watershed for men and women writers around gender.

And I think it's had a lot of effects, but if we go right back, when could say that there was hate to use the phrase crisis of masculinity, but maybe just a crisis around what gender means.

Each time after world war is war is seem to throw those things up for men so that the interwar, the interwar fiction, both American and British, I think had some of that, that feel to it.

And certainly the fiction, American fiction, after the second world war, I think starts out as a kind of critique, a pre-feminist, pre-modern feminist critique of masculinity, and then becomes something else.

After a while, again, I think there is another break around feminism where writers are rethinking, I don't know whether male writers feel they have a kind of feminist looking over their shoulder.

And that's not very good for writing, I'm sure.

...