Can I read Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850) on EtoBox?

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850) by Declan W. Kavanagh is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850) about?

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 surr

Author

Declan W. Kavanagh

Publisher

Bucknell University Press ; The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc

Published

2017

Language

EN

ISBN

9781611488241

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Gender Studies, Humanities