Mens Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 16601784 [Paperback]

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.Introduction Poets of the Times: Rochester, Oldham, and Restoration Literary Culture From the Stage to the Closet: Dryden's Journey Into Print, Manhood, and Poetic Authority 'A good Poet is no small Thing': Pope and the Problem of Pleasure for Sale 'I shall be but a shrimp of an author': Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet 'I also am a Man': Johnson's Lives and the Gender of the Poet

Men's Work marks a significant breakthrough in gender studies as they relate to other kinds of historical investigation. By thinking about professionalization and social class in relation to gender, Zionkowski demonstrates that the old man of letters category is problematic in a variety of ways - and not just for women writers. The book is theoretically sophisticated and historically informed. It represents both wide and deep reading and is smart and challenging in its refusal to honor hallowed, separate categories. This is an important study that will help us rethink the interrelationship of key historical, professional, social, and gender structurings. - J. Paul Hunter, University of Chicago

Zionkowski offers a strong and focused argument for the emergel#à