The Existential Sublime in Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex

Authors

  • Lawrence R. Broer University of South Florida Author

Keywords:

The Prisoner of Sex, sexuality and existentialism, the sublime, feminism and literature, gender and power, sexual politics, postwar American literature

Abstract

Norman Mailer’s mysterious emotional and spiritual experience clarifies Mailer’s art and vision in important ways. It illuminates the metaphysics that frame Mailer’s work as a whole: Mailer’s war between a Primitivist God and a Technological Devil struggling for mankind’s divided soul. What appears most important is the author’s penetrating and unprecedented explorations of the complex American psyche in books like The Prisoner of Sex, where his literary genius shines brightest and establishes his supremacy as the most sage and incisive social critic of the American Twentieth Century.

Author Biography

  • Lawrence R. Broer, University of South Florida

    Lawrence R. Broer is Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida and he earned his PhD from Bowling Green State University. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy (U of Alabama P, 1973), Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (U of Alabama P, 1994), Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (U of Alabama P 2002) and Vonnegut and Hemingway: Writers At War (U of South Carolina Press, 2011). Professor Broer has contributed essays to numerous anthologies of literary criticism and has authored eighty-five articles and critical papers on modern and postmodern literature.

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Published

2026-10-10

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Future Bound

Section

Articles