A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Download A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119082129
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature by : John Richetti

Download or read book A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature written by John Richetti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is a lively exploration of one of the most diverse and innovative periods in literary history. Capturing the richness and excitement of the era, this book provides extensive coverage of major authors, poets, dramatists, and journalists of the period, such as Dryden, Pope and Swift, while also exploring the works of important writers who have received less attention by modern scholars, such as Matthew Prior and Charles Churchill. Uniquely, the book also discusses noncanonical, working-class writers and demotic works of the era. During the eighteenth-century, Britain experienced vast social, political, economic, and existential changes, greatly influencing the literary world. The major forms of verse, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, experimental works, drama, and political prose from writers such as Montagu, Finch, Johnson, Goldsmith and Cowper, are discussed here in relation to their historical context. A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of English literature. Topics covered include: Verse in the early 18th century, from Pope, Gay, and Swift to Addison, Defoe, Montagu, and Finch Poetry from the mid- to late-century, highlighting the works of Johnson, Gray, Collins, Smart, Goldsmith, and Cowper among others, as well as women and working-class poets Prose Fiction in the early and 18th century, including Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett The novel past mid-century, including experimental works by Johnson, Sterne, Mackenzie, Walpole, Goldsmith, and Burney Non-fiction prose, including political and polemical prose 18th century drama

Novel Bodies

Download Novel Bodies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1684481090
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (844 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Novel Bodies by : Jason S. Farr

Download or read book Novel Bodies written by Jason S. Farr and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Sapphic Crossings

Download Sapphic Crossings PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813945526
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sapphic Crossings by : Ula Lukszo Klein

Download or read book Sapphic Crossings written by Ula Lukszo Klein and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men’s clothing—from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men’s breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels, and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman came to signal more than female independence or unconventional behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how various British texts from the period associate female cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied sexuality in the past.

The Savage and Modern Self

Download The Savage and Modern Self PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 148750344X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Savage and Modern Self by : Robbie Richardson

Download or read book The Savage and Modern Self written by Robbie Richardson and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Savage and Modern Self examines the representations of North American "Indians" in novels, poetry, plays, and material culture from eighteenth-century Britain. Author Robbie Richardson argues that depictions of "Indians" in British literature were used to critique and articulate evolving ideas about consumerism, colonialism, "Britishness," and, ultimately, the "modern self" over the course of the century. Considering the ways in which British writers represented contact between Britons and "Indians," both at home and abroad, the author shows how these sites of contact moved from a self-affirmation of British authority earlier in the century, to a mutual corruption, to a desire to appropriate perceived traits of "Indianess." Looking at texts exclusively produced in Britain, The Savage and Modern Self reveals that "the modern" finds definition through imagined scenes of cultural contact. By the end of the century, Richardson concludes, the hybrid Indian-Brition emerging in literature and visual culture exemplifies a form of modern, British masculinity.

British Literature

Download British Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781940771533
Total Pages : 610 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (715 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis British Literature by : Bonnie J. Robinson

Download or read book British Literature written by Bonnie J. Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part One of Four Small Format: 6" x 9" The University of North Georgia Press and Affordable Learning Georgia bring you British Literature I: From the Middle Ages to Neoclassicism and the Eighteenth Century. Featuring over 50 authors and full texts of their works, this anthology follows the shift of monarchic to parliamentarian rule in Britain, and the heroic epic to the more egalitarian novel as genre. Features: Original introductions to The Middle Ages; The Sixteenth Century: The Tudor Age; The Seventeenth Century: The Age of Revolution; and Neoclassicism and the Eighteenth Century Over 100 historical images Instructional Design, including Reading and Review Questions and Key Terms Forthcoming ancillary with open-enabled pedagogy, allowing readers to contribute to the project

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Download Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801889340
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France by : Lynn Festa

Download or read book Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France written by Lynn Festa and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-10-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation. Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.

Fictions of Presence

Download Fictions of Presence PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1783275588
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (832 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fictions of Presence by : Rosalind Ballaster

Download or read book Fictions of Presence written by Rosalind Ballaster and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Download The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139825046
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (398 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel by : John Richetti

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel written by John Richetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

Cruelty and Laughter

Download Cruelty and Laughter PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022614254X
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Cruelty and Laughter by : Simon Dickie

Download or read book Cruelty and Laughter written by Simon Dickie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain, this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals, variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.

Painting the Novel

Download Painting the Novel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351137794
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (511 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Painting the Novel by : Jakub Lipski

Download or read book Painting the Novel written by Jakub Lipski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction focuses on the interrelationship between eighteenth-century theories of the novel and the art of painting – a subject which has not yet been undertaken in a book-length study. This volume argues that throughout the century novelists from Daniel Defoe to Ann Radcliffe referred to the visual arts, recalling specific names or artworks, but also artistic styles and conventions, in an attempt to define the generic constitution of their fictions. In this, the novelists took part in the discussion of the sister arts, not only by pointing to the affinities between them but also, more importantly, by recognising their potential to inform one another; in other words, they expressed a conviction that the theory of a new genre can be successfully rendered through meta-pictorial analogies. By tracing the uses of painting in eighteenth-century novelistic discourse, this book sheds new light on the history of the so-called "rise of the novel".

Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England

Download Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000031063
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England by : Stephen Copley

Download or read book Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England written by Stephen Copley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship had emphasised the importance of a number of non-literary, economic and social debates to the understanding of Augustan Literature. Debates over the place of land, money, credit and luxury in society, as well as strands of radical thinking, are prominent throughout the period. Originally published in 1984, this anthology of eighteenth century writings about contemporary society is divided into sections on the social order, economics, the poor and crime, with a general introduction identifying some of the dominant social discourses of the period. They reflect the emergence of an embryonic capitalist society, with its challenge to feudal ties, and of a nascent bourgeois class. This collection of writings is not intended to provide material for an empirical historical account of these changes, but to give some idea of the ideological terms in which they are perceived, endorsed or contested by contemporaries; and provide a set of discursive contexts in which the imaginative literature of the period can be read. The texts themselves repay close analysis as the bearers of complex ideological positions and it is interesting to observe how, for example, Pope accommodates Shaftesbury and Mandeville in the Moral Essays. A fascinating anthology, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, complete with editor’s introduction and notes on the passages, aims to suggest lines of inquiry without offering a ‘total’ reading.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture

Download A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1405192453
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (51 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture by : Paula R. Backscheider

Download or read book A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture written by Paula R. Backscheider and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-19 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Download An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0230629466
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction by : John Skinner

Download or read book An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction written by John Skinner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature. These reservations were taken into account in the writing of this book. An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to English fiction from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. It deals with novel criticism, canon formation and relations between genre and gender. The second part of the book contains an extensive discussion of Richardson and Fielding, followed by paired readings of major eighteenth-century novels, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney among others. The various sections of the book, and even the individual chapters, may be read independently or in any order. Works are discussed in a way intended to help students who have not read them, and even engage with some who never will. The author consumes eighteenth-century fiction avidly, but has tried to write a reader-friendly survey for those who may not.

In Search of the Supernatural

Download In Search of the Supernatural PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804764719
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis In Search of the Supernatural by : Bao Gan

Download or read book In Search of the Supernatural written by Bao Gan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first complete translation into a Western language of Sou-shen Chi, a fourth-century Chinese collection of 464 extraordinary, fantastic, or bizarre items. The subjects of these brief anecdotes and narratives include natural curiosities, gods, religious figures, omens, dreams, divinations, miracles, monsters, strange animals, demons, ghosts, and exorcists. The stories range from sober reports of drought and misfortune to accounts of a fox transformed into a turtle, persons whose heads could take independent flight at night, a tryst in a tomb, and the marriages of humans with spirits." "Sou-shen Chi is the oldest, richest, and most consulted example of the chi-kuai genre, an important division of classical Chinese literature demonstrating features of narrative technique and ethereal sensibility that point to chi-kuai as the earliest examples of Chinese fiction. Of the three surviving versions of Sou-shen Chi, the 20-chapter edition translated here is widely accepted as the best representation of the work of its compiler, Kan Pao, the official court historian for Emperor Yuan of the Chin dynasty. The style of the writing is terse, almost austere, and it has qualities of documentary prose, a reflection of its common ancestry with historical writing. An introduction deals with the text and its background, authorship, contents, versions, and transmission." "Sou-shen Chi served as a model for subsequent collections and provided many basic plots, characters, and situations for plays, novels, and even poetry. The stories were widely known and became part of the body of allusions that literate Chinese knew and used in their own writings. For example, in the twentieth century Lu Xun retold, in extended fashion, a tale of magic swords that comes from Sou-shen Chi."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Download Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748634568
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies by : Suvir Kaul

Download or read book Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies written by Suvir Kaul and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'Professor Donna Landry, University of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland. The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity.Key Features*An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature*Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined

Literary Historicity

Download Literary Historicity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804759111
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literary Historicity by : Ruth Mack

Download or read book Literary Historicity written by Ruth Mack and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience. Mack moves between close examinations of literature, historiography, and recent philosophical writing on history, offering a new view of eighteenth-century philosophies of history in Britain. Such philosophies, she argues, could be important literarily without being focused, as has been assumed, on questions of fact and fiction. Eighteenth-century writers—like many twentieth-century philosophers—often used literary form not in order to exhibit a work's fictional status but in order to consider what the relation between the past and present might be. Literary Historicity portrays a British Enlightenment that both embraces the possibility of historical experience and interrogates the terms for such experience, one deeply engaged with historical consciousness not as an inevitability of the modern world, but as something to be understood within it.

Effeminate Years

Download Effeminate Years PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611488257
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Effeminate Years by : Declan Kavanagh

Download or read book Effeminate Years written by Declan Kavanagh and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.