Men s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660 1784

Zionkowski, L.

ISBN 10: 1349386456 / ISBN 13: 9781349386451

Published by MacMillan, 2001

About this Item

Print on Demand pp. 288.

Seller Inventory # 385608876

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Men s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660 1784
• Publisher: MacMillan
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1349386456
• ISBN 13: 9781349386451
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and eighteenth century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet's social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of masculinity: the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers' cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market's function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.

About the Author

LINDA ZIONKOWSKI is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University.