Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780312237585)

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.

Author: L. Zionkowski
ISBN-10: 0312237588
ISBN-13: 9780312237585
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 02/28/2001
Pages: 279
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 8.83h x 5.86w x 0.93d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2001 pg. 314
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2001 pg. 234