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

by Declan Kavanagh

Overview

This booktraces 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611488265
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Series:	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Effeminate Years
Chapter 1: “HERCULES, turn’d Beau”: Charles Churchill’s Satire
Chapter 2: Enlightenment Closets: Publishing Privacy
Chapter 3: Mobocracy: Public Opinion and the Free Press
Chapter 4: Bog Men: Celtic Landscapes during the Seven Years’ War
Chapter 5: Effeminate Aesthetics and Backstairs Politics
Coda
Bibliography
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Kavanagh (Univ. of Kent, UK) presents an investigation into the twilight world of gender/sex-fluid men—referred to as, among other monikers, sodomites, catamites, and mollies—during Britain’s Georgian period. Kavanagh's critical examination of the works of Charles Churchill, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and others illuminates the role effeminacy played in shaping discourse of the day. Kavanagh’s embedded thesis is that fluid identity and outré sexual practices of this period challenged the era’s sensibilities and set the precedent for current efforts to broaden gender and sexual categorizations. In this regard, Kavanagh’s book complements extant research on the subject. Kavanagh’s obvious authority on the subject matter qualifies him for inclusion among the field’s most credible scholars.... [T]he book’s value to English history, literary studies, and gender and sexuality studies stands unquestioned. Summing Up: Essential. Researchers and faculty.

Choice

Effeminate Years is a wonderful book. Beautifully written and engaging throughout, at times its wittiness is absolutely dazzling; but still the argument is rigorous and really compelling throughout. This is a book for anyone interested in gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century or in queer studies more generally. In an age of ever-richer political satire, moreover, this book offers a special treat for readers.​

George Haggerty

Effeminate Years explores how ideal versions of masculinity become imbricated in idealised versions of nationality and ethnicity. Specifically, this book reveals how discourses of effeminacy and idealised masculinity structure the formation of English, Irish and Scots ethnic identities in the years when the project of the British Empire was emerging from infancy. The mid’ years of the Eighteenth Century saw the final defeat of Gaelic Jacobite hopes and the consolidation of an ascendant English Protestant nationalism which segued into British colonialism. Effeminate Years provides a remarkably comprehensive, deft and very entertaining account of the culture wars of these important years to demonstrate how the cultural productions of the era manifest anxiety, opportunism and counter-strategy about what kind of man should and would lead the development of Britain and expansion of empire.

Katherine O'Donnell

Kavanagh (Univ. of Kent, UK) presents an investigation into the twilight world of gender/sex-fluid men—referred to as, among other monikers, sodomites, catamites, and mollies—during Britain’s Georgian period. Kavanagh's critical examination of the works of Charles Churchill, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and others illuminates the role effeminacy played in shaping discourse of the day. Kavanagh’s embedded thesis is that fluid identity and outré sexual practices of this period challenged the era’s sensibilities and set the precedent for current efforts to broaden gender and sexual categorizations. In this regard, Kavanagh’s book complements extant research on the subject. Kavanagh’s obvious authority on the subject matter qualifies him for inclusion among the field’s most credible scholars.... [T]he book’s value to English history, literary studies, and gender and sexuality studies stands unquestioned. Summing Up: Essential. Researchers and faculty.

Choice Reviews

Kavanagh (Univ. of Kent, UK) presents an investigation into the twilight world of gender/sex-fluid men—referred to as, among other monikers, sodomites, catamites, and mollies—during Britain’s Georgian period. Kavanagh's critical examination of the works of Charles Churchill, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and others illuminates the role effeminacy played in shaping discourse of the day. Kavanagh’s embedded thesis is that fluid identity and outré sexual practices of this period challenged the era’s sensibilities and set the precedent for current efforts to broaden gender and sexual categorizations. In this regard, Kavanagh’s book complements extant research on the subject. Kavanagh’s obvious authority on the subject matter qualifies him for inclusion among the field’s most credible scholars.... [T]he book’s value to English history, literary studies, and gender and sexuality studies stands unquestioned. Summing Up: Essential. Researchers and faculty.

CHOICE