Masculinity and its metonyms.

The author responds to the articles in this issue by demonstrating how a twentieth-century poem might provide us with a fresh perspective on the situated historical understandings of bodies gendered as male provided here. Amichai uses the literary figure of metonymy to show how ‘a man’ has no time for history: he allows a part to speak for the whole, and a specific cultural moment to stand for any time. Historians and literary scholars alike would benefit from attending to our own metonyms, and the historical continuities we assume or assert as we seek to investigate cultural difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]