1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910484021003321

Autore

Newbon Pete

Titolo

The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth Century / / by Pete Newbon

Pubbl/distr/stampa

London : , : Palgrave Macmillan UK : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2019

ISBN

1-137-40814-6

Edizione

[1st ed. 2019.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (364 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, , 2634-6532

Disciplina

155.332

Soggetti

Social history

Great Britain—History

Civilization—History

Childhood

Adolescence

Literature—History and criticism

Social History

History of Britain and Ireland

Cultural History

Childhood, Adolescence and Society

Literary History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Too Much the Boy-Man -- Self-Incurred Immaturity -- Literary Origins: Sterne, Rousseau, Chatterton, and Wordsworth -- Namby-Pamby Wordsworth -- The Marks of Infancy Were Burned Into Him -- Chapter 6: Little Johnny Keats: A Boy of Pretty Abilities -- Lamb and the Age of Cant: Jokes, Puns, and Nonsense -- Hartley Coleridge and the Muscular Christians -- Pantomime and the Politics of Play -- The Dark Interpreter: De Quincey, and the Legacy of Wordsworthian Childhood -- A Farewell to Skimpole: Romantic Boy-Men and Canonical Occlusion -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus



of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters. .