Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. Critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century.

Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore an ongoing compositional crisis in which a series of male authors struggle to accommodate identity-threatening desires, and yet consolidate literature as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise.