Male Armor : University of Virginia Press : 9780813927534 : 0813927536 : 29 Aug 2008 : There is no shortage of iconic masculine imagery of the soldier in American film and literature?one only has to think of George C. Scott as Patton in front of a giant American flag, Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, or Burt Lancaster rolling around in the surf in From Here to Eternity. In Male Armor, Jon Robert Adams examines the ways in which novels, plays, and films about America's late-twentieth-century wars reflect altering perceptions of masculinity in the culture at large. He highlights the gap between the cultural conception of masculinity and the individual experience of it, and exposes the myth of war as an experience that verifies manhood.Drawing on a wide range of work, from the war novels of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller to David Rabe's play Streamers and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Adams examines the evolving image of the soldier from World War I to Operat