Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 16601815 [Hardcover]

Becoming the Gentleman explains why British citizens in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. Supplementing recent work on femininity, Solinger identifies a corpus of texts that address masculinity and challenges the notion of a masculine figure that has been regarded as unchanging.Gentlemen and their Knowledge of the World The Politics of Alexander Pope's Urbanity Popular Writing and the Promise of Gentility from The Connoisseur to Evelina Austen's Fiction in the Age of Commerce Sir Walter Scott and the Gentrification of Empire

Solinger's encyclopedic reference to primary and secondary sources make this book a state-of-the-art reconsideration of the period and a valuable resource. Summing up: Highly recommended. - CHOICE

It is a real pleasure to read amonograph so firmly in control of the argument it develops. In addition to illuminating the covert politics of eighteenth-century literature, this study provides an important prehistory to the current state of ''liberal education' and our own presumptions about how learning and literacy contribute to social life. - Novel

Solinger's study makes a valuable contribution to the broader scholarship on modern masculine identity by tracing its emergence from a historically specific and culturally stable, yet at the same time highly malleable figure that of 'the

gentleman'.' - Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As Solinger so deftly argues, no figure is more central to the transition into modernity than the modern British gentleman. Incorporating facets of traditional masculinity within forms increasingly independent of inherited status and ever more widely accessible through popular literature, the gentleman becomes the lynchpin of modern bourgeois culture and of British imperialism. Tracing the trope 'knowledge of the world' through neoclassical poetry, educational treatises, the periodical, alC!