Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates
Author: Erin Mackie
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2009-02-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801895308

A study of the depiction and development of masculine figures in eighteenth-century British literature. Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate. Mackie traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order. In Evelina’s Lord Orville, Clarissa’s Lovelace, Rookwood’s Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male. “In this well-researched study, Mackie makes a strong case for the inclusion of alternative, criminal masculinities in understanding the development of the modern English gentleman and patriarchy in the eighteenth century. Situated at the nexus of gender theory and literary studies, her book adds to the study of modern and late modern cultural norms of gender and sexuality through discourse analysis of literary and nonliterary texts.” —Srividhya Swaminathan, Journal of British Studies “The topic is lively, the writing clear, and the argument persuasive. Bringing together histories of criminality, of gender, and of manners cuts across the period in a new way that promises to produce lively debate.” —James Thompson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “The central concern of this book is the transformation of the “British gentleman” from the so-called Glorious Revolution through reformulations of patriarchy as exhibited in taste, sensibility, and virtue in the 18th century and beyond.” —Choice

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates
Author: Erin Mackie
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2009-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801890888

Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

A Genealogy of the Gentleman

A Genealogy of the Gentleman
Author: Mary Beth Harris
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1644533308

A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their narrative constructions of the gentleman. It challenges two latent critical assumptions: first, that the gentleman’s masculinity is normative, private, and therefore oppositional to concepts of performance; and second, that women writers, from their disadvantaged position within a patriarchal society, had no real means of influencing dominant structures of masculinity. By placing writers such as Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author—Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Richardson—Mary Beth Harris shows how these women carved out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and appeal were dependent on women’s influence. Ultimately, this project considers the import of these women writers’ legacy, both progressive and conservative, on hegemonic standards of masculinity that persist to this day.

British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730

British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730
Author: Dr Margarette Lincoln
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2014-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472429958

This book shows how pirates were portrayed in their own time, in trial reports, popular prints, novels, legal documents, sermons, ballads and newspaper accounts. It examines how attitudes towards them changed with Britain’s growing imperial power, exploring the interface between political ambition and personal greed, between civil liberties and the power of the state. It throws light on contemporary ideals of leadership and masculinity - some pirate voyages qualifying as feats of seamanship and endurance. Unusually, it also gives insights into the domestic life of pirates and investigates the experiences of women whose husbands turned pirate or were captured for piracy. Pirate voyages contributed to British understanding of trans-oceanic navigation, patterns of trade and different peoples in remote parts of the world. This knowledge advanced imperial expansion and British control of trade routes, which helps to explain why contemporary attitudes towards piracy were often ambivalent. This is an engaging study of vested interests and conflicting ideologies. It offers comparisons with our experience of piracy today and shows how the historic representation of pirate behaviour can illuminate other modern preoccupations, including gang culture.

Ways of the World

Ways of the World
Author: Laura J. Rosenthal
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501751603

Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.

British Pirates in Print and Performance

British Pirates in Print and Performance
Author: M. Powell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2015-03-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137339926

Fictional or real, pirates haunted the imagination of the 18th and 19th century-British public during this great period of maritime commerce, exploration, and naval conflict. British Pirates in Print and Performanc e explores representations of pirates through dozens of stage performances, including adaptations by Byron, Scott, and Cooper.

The Origins of the English Marriage Plot

The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
Author: Lisa O'Connell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108485685

Examines how and why marriage plots became the English novel's most popular form in the eighteenth century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English literature and culture as well as feminist literary history.

Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture

Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture
Author: Roxie J. James
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2020-03-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030395855

This book delves into humanity’s compulsive need to valorize criminals. The criminal hero is a seductive figure, and audiences get a rather scopophilic pleasure in watching people behave badly. This book offers an analysis of the varied and vexing definitions of hero, criminal, and criminal heroes both historically and culturally. This book also examines the global presence, gendered complications, and gentle juxtapositions in criminal hero figures such as: Robin Hood, Breaking Bad, American Gods, American Vandal, Kabir, Plunkett and Macleane, Martha Stewart, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Eleven, and Let The Bullets Fly.

The Other Exchange

The Other Exchange
Author: Denys Van Renen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496200489

Prompted by commercial and imperial expansion such as the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the publication and circulation of Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News in 1626, rapidly changing cultural, economic, and political realities in early modern England generated a paradigmatic shift in class awareness. Denys Van Renen’s The Other Exchange demonstrates how middle-class consciousness not only emerged in opposition to the lived and perceived abuses of the aristocratic elite but also was fostered by the economic and sociocultural influence of women and lower-class urban communities. Van Renen contends that, fascinated by the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the urban underclass, many major authors and playwrights in the early modern era—Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe—featured lower-class men and women and other marginalized groups in their work as a response to the shifting political and social terrain of the day. Van Renen illuminates this fascination with marginalized groups as a key element in the development of a middle-class mindset.

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology
Author: Brian McCrea
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1644530716

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney’s eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its “gendering” of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney’s housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt’s “Formal Realism” (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre). Burney’s most successful writing appeared before the coining of “ideology.” But her standing “prior to ideology” is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations—domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre—that became popular during her long and eventful life. Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, “in private conversation,” claiming, “Marxism . . . has no way of understanding the eighteenth century.” Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney’s “eighteenth-centuryness” with her modernity. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.