Mark:
> No end to rogue books. Head's The English Rogue (1665), Norris' Life and
> Death of the English Rogue (c. 1711), lots before, in between and
> afterwards, with several detours through Defoe country--a vastly popular
> genre, which popularity both Fielding and Gay were counting on.
In terms of secondary texts, there's Gillian Spraggs, +Outlaws and
Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the
Nineteenth Century+ (2001) -- a lovely piece of work, although Gill was
really more interested in cross-dressed female crims like Long Meg than the
boys.
> My major field was the Restoration, because I couldn't imagine anything
> more foreign, not to say inordinately sexy.
I was the opposite -- the only period I disliked more than the Restoration
was the later nineteenth century. I had (with the exception of Wycherley) a
particular distaste for the drama of that time.
Then there's the Newgate Calendar and George Borrow.
But the genre Larry comes from is more specific -- the last goodnight,
address-from-the-gallows poems -- "Armstrong's Last Goodnight" and stuff
like that, but.
R.
http://www.outlawsandhighwaymen.com/author.htm
(I was nearly included in +Love Shook My Senses+. The only reason I wasn't
was that it hadn't occurred to me to mention to Gill that I was once the
Only Scottish Lesbian Poet Ever (Once) before she compiled the anthology.
She was a particularly acute classical scholar, and the lord knows why I
seemed to have a compulsion to argue with Gill about Greek literature in
front of an audience, since I invariably came off worse.
Not just slightly worse but, which had less to do with how my classical
knowledge was lamentable compared to Gill's, much worse, as we'd been
trained in the same sort of school. What was it about Glasgow and Cambridge
that seemed to make any graduate a rabid rottweiller when it came to
discussion?)
|