With the coining of the term "masochism" in the late nineteenth century began the transformation of the traditional, sacrificial male lover of women into an unmasculine pervert. Today literary criticism, theory, and gender studies suggest that we have lost faith in men's capacity to love women. What was once considered love is now seen as misogynistic sickness.

This book traces the development of this new vision through modern and postmodern texts as they respond to prior representations of male submission to love. Showing how our understanding of love was and continues to be shaped by narrative, and how literature has both aided and resisted the redefinition of male love as male masochism, Carol Siegel recovers a mode of understanding heterosexuality that departs from the patriarchal gender ideology that has dominated our readings for the past hundred years.

Siegel explores the literary tradition of representing male love as service and ordeal and looks at how modernist and postmodernist writers and filmmakers have responded to this tradition and how psychoanalytic theorists have depicted the behaviors they labeled masochistic. Among the novels and films she discusses are Mary Webb's Gone to Earth, James Joyce's Ulysses, D. H.

Lawrence's Women in Love, Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter.