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

by Zionkowski, Linda

• ISBN13: 9780312237585
• ISBN10: 0312237588
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-03
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th 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.

Author Biography

Linda Zionkowski is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(24)
Poets of the Times: Rochester, Oldham, and Restoration Literary Culture	25	(42)
From the Stage to the Closet: Dryden's Journey into Print, Manhood, and Poetic Authority	67	(30)
``A good Poet is no small Thing'': Pope and the Problem of Pleasure for Sale	97	(32)
``I shall be but a shrimp of an author'': Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet	129	(42)
``I also am a Man'': Johnson's Lives and the Gender of the Poet	171	(34)
Afterword	205	(8)
Notes	213	(42)
Bibliography	255	(18)
Index	273