This book undertakes a detailed reading of Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man examining this
Canadian novel in its transnational historical and socio-cultural context. Key subject headings
are biology and culture sex and gender eugenics and contraception writing and reading. The
overarching theme is «disenchanted modernity» in the twentieth-century the systematic
displacement of the divine and natural order by a humanly ordained social regime and by forms
of social engineering that brought to bear the full force of modern science invasively to
alter the most fundamental conditions of human life. The more immediate literary frames of
reference are Greek mythology early Christian debates on the body and marriage and the lore
of the North American Aboriginal trickster as these are deployed and alluded to in Kroetsch's
novel. In establishing the sources and contexts of The Studhorse Man this study examines
Robert Kroetsch's early drafts of the novel and his many notes taken and clippings assembled
during its composition. An effort has been made to appeal to a wide range of general and
academic readers alike by avoiding specialized jargon and adopting a cross-disciplinary
approach. This book will be of interest to scholars of literature and literary theory and of
use in courses on literature and the novel on masculinity and gender studies and on cultural
history in the twentieth century.
