Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815

Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815
Author: Julia Banister
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108168884

This book investigates the figure of the military man in the long eighteenth century in order to explore how ideas about militarism served as vehicles for conceptualizations of masculinity. Bringing together representations of military men and accounts of court martial proceedings, this book examines eighteenth-century arguments about masculinity and those that appealed to the 'naturally' sexed body and construed masculinity as social construction and performance. Julia Banister's discussion draws on a range of printed materials, including canonical literary and philosophical texts by David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole and Jane Austen, and texts relating to the naval trials of, amongst others, Admiral John Byng. By mapping eighteenth-century ideas about militarism, including professionalism and heroism, alongside broader cultural concerns with politeness, sensibility, the Gothic past and celebrity, Julia Banister reveals how ideas about masculinity and militarism were shaped by and within eighteenth-century culture.

Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture

Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture
Author: Dafydd Moore
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-12-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000287564

Richard Polwhele was a writer of rare energies. Today known only for The Unsex’d Females and its attack on radical women writers, Polwhele was a historian, translator, memoirist, and poet. As an indigent Cornish gentleman clergyman and JP, his extensive written output encompassed sermons, open letters, and even headstone verse. This book recovers the lost Polwhele, locating him within an archipelagic understanding of the vitality and complexity inherent in the loyalist tradition with British Romantic culture via a range of previously unexamined texts and manuscript sources. Torn between a desire for sociability and an appetite (and capacity) for a good argument, Polwhele’s outspoken contributions across a range of disciplines testify to the variety and dynamism of what has previously been considered provincial and reactionary. This book locates Polwhele’s work within key preoccupations of the age: the social, economic, and political valences of literary sociability in the age of print; the meaning of loyalism in an age of revolution; the meaning of place and belonging; enthusiasm, religious or otherwise; and the self-fashioning of the provincial man of letters. In doing so it argues for a broader definition of Romanticism than the one that has typed Polwhele as an unpalatable embarrassment and the anachronistic voice of provincial High Tory reaction. This volume will be of interest to those working in the field of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British Literature, with a particular focus on politics and on the nature of literary production and identity across the non-metropolitan areas of the British Isles.

Beyond Liberty and Property

Beyond Liberty and Property
Author: John Alexander Wilson Gunn
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1983
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773510067

Professor Gunn presents a fresh, revealing picture of the public mind in Britain, from the Glorious Revolution to the First Reform Act, showing how British people of the eighteenth century came to a new understanding of politics. Departing form the usual