“Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine!” Terminator 3 provides David Greven's study of “inviolate” males in American literature with a “defining line” (226). Men beyond Desire maps an antebellum tradition of isolate figures who are “emotionally, sexually, and psychically unavailable either to women or men” (1); characterized in these terms, Ichabod Crane, Miles Coverdale and Uncle Tom (amongst others) interrogate hegemonic codes of manhood in mid-nineteenth-century America. For Greven, they make manifest tensions between “compulsory” heterosexuality and homosociality, and a swarm of competing social movements and ideologies (including sexual reform and Jacksonian self-made manhood) which urged white, middle-class men to master their passions – to become, in the words of reformer Benjamin Rush, “republican machines” (14). Although Greven focusses on antebellum fiction, he tracks the trope into twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film (chapters 1 and 7). Ultimately the book claims a fundamental significance for male desire in the context of American community, even or especially when desire appears to be absent or “irrelevant.”

In chapters 1 to 3, close readings of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Fanshawe and the Leatherstocking saga develop the figure of the inviolate male in a series of specific sociopolitical contexts. In each case, the protagonist's lack of normative desire “allows for queer potentiality” (49) which challenges the concept of the normal. The latter half of the book examines the inviolate male's role as catalyst within a nexus of competing desires and ideologies, with reference to male–male relationships in Hawthorne and Poe (chapters 4 and 5), sexualized-inviolate African American manhood in Uncle Tom's Cabin (chapter 6), and the work of later African American male authors who wrote in Stowe's “aftermath” (chapter 7). In the final chapter, Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor is read as both a “distillation” and postbellum critique of the logic of inviolate manhood (194).

Such a summary cannot do justice to Greven's tenacious and often brilliant readings. His observations on “fraternalist bias” (54) within contemporary criticism and theory are particularly provocative, as is his emphasis on the violence perpetrated against non-normative figures. Although the inviolate male's resistance has heroic aspects, his isolation is frequently disturbing; the book is far from a paean to American individualism. At points, clarification would be welcome. Greven introduces his texts as “iconic” (1); if status justifies the grouping which yields a “cohesive version” of American manhood, one might ask who considered these texts to be “crucial” (2), and when? How do non-crucial texts inflect the model? These queries do not detract from what is a valuable and engaging contribution to recent work on gender and antebellum literature.