NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY
Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of
Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth,
Hazlitt and De Quincey
by Tim Fulford
Macmillan, April 1999. 272 pp, ISBN 0333683250, £45.
Romanticism in Perspective series, gen. eds. Marilyn Gaull and Stephen
Prickett
"Manliness": the word resounds through the Romantic age, in parliament,
pamphlet and poem. A term of praise, it was also a word under question.
Supposedly present in political action and in literary style, it was an
expression of essential masculinity. And without that essential
masculinity, critics agreed, the nation would be leaderless.
But what form should manliness take? Byron famously wanted a hero. So did
Hazlitt. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson, on the other hand, wanted
women to achieve the authority that was thought to be a solely masculine
preserve. In this book, Tim Fulford examines the Romantics' versions of
masculinity and authority in the context of the political debates of Regency
Britain. He shows that home affairs - including the sex scandals of the
royal family - were as influential as the events of revolutionary France in
shaping Romantic conceptions of gender. He investigates how these
conceptions were subjected to tension, as the Romantics sought to be
powerful themselves, as well as to provide models for power. In their
poetry, their aesthetic theory and their political journalism, they
struggled to write like men, even as they searched for a different version
of manliness from those that dominated the political sphere. Discussing
Burke's influence in the 1790s, Fulford also examines Coleridge's response
to the Gothic of Radcliffe and Lewis. He throws new light on the figures of
Godwin and Southey, while assessing the alternatives offered by
Wollstonecraft and Robinson. Chapter-length discussions of Coleridge's
criticism and Wordsworth's poetry refocus both in the light of their
concerns, private and public, to seem "all man". De Quincey and Hazlitt are
shown to be continuing the course of the elder Romantics even as they
demystify and debunk the kind of manliness for which they stood. Looming
over - and vital to an understanding of - them all is the most popular and
feared political writer of the age - Cobbett, the verbal pugilist whose
"manly" prose the Romantics admired, envied and loathed.
Chapters:
1. Some Versions of Masculinity in Romanticism
2. Burke: The Gendering of Power
3. Coleridge in the 1790s: "Lord of thy Utterance"?
4. "Manly Reflection": Masculinity in Coleridge's Criticism
5. Sexual Politics: Burke, Coleridge and Cobbett
6. Wordsworth: The "Time Dismantled Oak?"
7. De Quincey and Hazlitt: To Have and Have Not the Power
Order from CUstomer Services, Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, RG21 6XS
tel 01256 329242 fax 01256 364733
in North America $58 (at 20% discount) from St Martin's Press, Scholarly and
Reference Division, 175 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10010
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