Men’s Work : Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th 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. 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. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-23 Poets of the Times: Rochester, Oldham, and Restoration Literary Culture....Pages 25-66 From the Stage to the Closet: Dryden’s Journey Into Print, Manhood, and Poetic Authority....Pages 67-96 “A good Poet is no Small Thing”: Pope and the Problem of Pleasure for Sale....Pages 97-128 “I Shall be but a Shrimp of an Author”: Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet....Pages 129-170 “I Also am a Man”: Johnson’s Lives and the Gender of the Poet....Pages 171-203 Afterword....Pages 205-211 Back Matter....Pages 213-279 This work examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th century. 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