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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century
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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain Paperback - 2019

by Declan Kavanagh


From the publisher

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes's political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes's politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes's legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes's spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke's (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community-a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.

Details

  • Title Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • Author Declan Kavanagh
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 268
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Bucknell University Press
  • Date 2019-11-05
  • Features Bibliography
  • ISBN 9781611488265 / 1611488265
  • Weight 0.87 lbs (0.39 kg)
  • Dimensions 9 x 6 x 0.61 in (22.86 x 15.24 x 1.55 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 18th Century
    • Cultural Region: British
  • Dewey Decimal Code 820.935

About the author

Declan Kavanagh is lecturer in eighteenth-century studies and director of the Centre for Gender, Sexuality, and Writing at the University of Kent.
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Effeminate Years : Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
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Effeminate Years : Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Declan Kavanagh

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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Declan Kavanagh

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781611488265 / 1611488265
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Paperback / softback. New. This book traces the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject back to the Enlightenment period in Britain to show how the very concept of political agency was shaped by anti-effeminate ideas and beliefs. This study queers our understanding of the political subject, which is still the basis for debate and argument.
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€46.88
€11.92 shipping to USA
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Declan Kavanagh

  • New
  • Paperback
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New
Binding
Paperback
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781611488265 / 1611488265
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10
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Southport, Merseyside, United Kingdom
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
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Paperback / softback. New. This book traces the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject back to the Enlightenment period in Britain to show how the very concept of political agency was shaped by anti-effeminate ideas and beliefs. This study queers our understanding of the political subject, which is still the basis for debate and argument.
Item Price
€54.14
€11.92 shipping to USA
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-eighteenth-century Britain
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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-eighteenth-century Britain

by Kavanagh, Declan

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781611488265 / 1611488265
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Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650?1850)

by Kavanagh, Declan

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