Effeminate England

Effeminate England PDF Author: Joseph Bristow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Focusing on the works and lives of several prominent British literary figures of the past century including E. M. Forster, John Addington Symonds, and Quentin Crisp, Bristow (English, U. of York, England) shows how the stereotype of effeminacy has been variously celebrated and challenged during the years since the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which criminalized male homosexual contact. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Effeminate England

Effeminate England PDF Author: Joseph Bristow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Focusing on the works and lives of several prominent British literary figures of the past century including E. M. Forster, John Addington Symonds, and Quentin Crisp, Bristow (English, U. of York, England) shows how the stereotype of effeminacy has been variously celebrated and challenged during the years since the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which criminalized male homosexual contact. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Effeminate Years

Effeminate Years PDF Author: Declan Kavanagh
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.

Colonial masculinity

Colonial masculinity PDF Author: Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526162938
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland

The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland PDF Author: K. D. M. Snell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521381975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The Regional Novel In Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990 will be of interest to literary and social historians as well as cultural critics.

Having a Good Cry

Having a Good Cry PDF Author: Robyn R. Warhol
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Robyn R. Warhol's goal is to investigate the effects of readers' emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol's theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans. Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as "effeminate" forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Matthew Biberman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical, and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a by-product of tensions between received Classical conceptions of masculinity and Christianity's strident critique of that ideal. Utilizing works by Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and others, Biberman illustrates how modern antisemitism develops as a way to stigmatize hypermasculine behavior, thus facilitating the transformation of the culture's gender ideal from knight to businessman. Subsequently, the function of antisemitism changes, becoming instead the mark of effeminate behavior. Consequently, the central antisemitic image changes from Jew-Devil to Jew-Sissy. Biberman traces this shift's repercussions, both in renaissance culture and what followed it. He also contends that as a result of this linkage between Jewishness and the limits of masculine behavior, the image of the Jewish woman remains especially unstable. In concluding, Biberman argues that the Gothic resurrects the Jew-Devil (bequeathing it to the Nazis), and that the horror genre is often a rewriting of Renaissance discourse about Jews. In the course of making this larger argument, Biberman introduces a series of more limited claims that challenge the conventional wisdom within the field of literary studies. First, Biberman overturns the assumption that Jewishness and femininity are always associated in the cultural imagination of Western Europe. Second, Biberman provides the historical context needed to understand the emergence of the stereotype of the pathological Jewish woman. Third, Biberman revises the incorrect notion that divorce was not practiced in Renaissance England. Fourth, Biberman argues for the novel claim that serial monogamy in Western culture is a practice understood to possess a Jewish "taint." Fifth, Biberman contributes a major advance in scholarship devoted to T. S. Eliot, illustrating how Eliot's famous critical argument against Milton is an expression of his antisemitism, and a coherent compliment to the antisemitic touches in his poetry. Sixth, in his discussion of Gothic literature, Biberman introduces novel readings of Frankenstein and Dracula, persuasively arguing that Mary Shelley's monster bears the mark of the Jew according to modern antisemitic discourse; and that, in Stoker, both the vampire and the vampire-killer represent Jews executing a scenario of self-policing that was realized in the ghettos and the concentration camps. Biberman's final contribution in this study is to provide a definition for postmodern antisemitism and to apply it to various contemporary incidents, including September 11th and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Fashioning Masculinity

Fashioning Masculinity PDF Author: Dr Michele Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134842201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The fashioning of English gentlemen in the eighteenth century was modelled on French practices of sociability and conversation. Michele Cohen shows how at the same time, the English constructed their cultural relations with the French as relations of seduction and desire. She argues that this produced anxiety on the part of the English over the effect of French practices on English masculinity and the virtue of English women. By the end of the century, representing the French as an effeminate other was integral to the forging of English, masculine national identity. Michele Cohen examines the derogation of women and the French which accompanied the emergent 'masculine' English identity. While taciturnity became emblematic of the English gentleman's depth of mind and masculinity, sprightly conversation was seen as representing the shallow and inferior intellect of English women and the French of both sexes. Michele Cohen also demonstrates how visible evidence of girls' verbal and language learning skills served only to construe the female mind as inferior. She argues that this perception still has currency today.

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: E. Clery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230509045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury , and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature PDF Author: Dr Christine Berberich
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409489973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society. Twentieth-century depictions of the gentleman thus have much to tell us about rapidly changing conceptions of national, class, and gender identity.

Gothic Masculinity

Gothic Masculinity PDF Author: Ellen Brinks
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838755242
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Hegel possessed : reading the gothic in the phenomenology of mind -- The male romantic poet as gothic subject : Keats's Hyperion and The fall of hyperion : a dream -- Sharing gothic secrets : Byron's The Giaour and Lara -- "This dream it would not pass away" : Christabel and mimetic enchantment -- The gothic romance of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess