A Comparison of Collocates of Masculinity in Classic English Texts

Some state that today, men are undergoing a “crisis of masculinity”, with “toxic masculinity” being at the center of this dialogue. For professional counselors, it is important that they are able to navigate men’s and boy’s issues in counseling, and looking at historical perspectives on masculinity may be of assistance to building healthy male identities. The aim of the current study is to understand the cultural origins of lemmas “manhood” and “masculinity” within the context of classic English literature, using a large corpus of English books from the 15th-18th centuries. A Sketch Engine study was employed using logDice to understand word collocations with the target lemmas. A Mann-Kendall test for monotonic trend was also used to see whether differences exist in usage over time, as well as a Theil-Sen regression to model those trends. Top collocates for “masculine” and “manhood” were “gender” and “godhead”, respectively, with “masculinity” only netting one usage within the whole corpus. There was no significant change over time in the usage of the targeted terms. Themes among collocates included establishment of masculine traits, dialogues about stages of life, and the religious symbolism of Jesus Christ.Keywords: masculinity, manhood, literature, English text, counseling