Eighteenth Century Masculinity And Jane Austen

Expectations placed on men of the late eighteenth century presented conflicting models of behavior for middle- and upper-class English men. Jane Austen's novels challenge eighteenth-century stereotypes of masculinity. Seven of Austen's male characters build upon accepted standards of masculinity by combining standards in eclectic ways and, in the process, reach self-actualization and interiority. While still using gentlemanlike behavior to varying degrees, the dynamic male characters temper the century's expectations regarding masculinity to show many more liberating possibilities for both the heroes and the heroines. Just as Austen's female characters are early examples of twentieth-century women, Austen's dynamic male characters also anticipate twentieth-century men. Because Austen is encouraging feminine and masculine liberation from expectations, her role as a novelist and social commentator takes on more significance. Instead of offering only stories of romances and social habits, Austen could be encouraging change in the society that she portrays so well.

Jane Austen and Masculinity is an eclectic collection of contemporary scholarship addressing the representation of men and masculinity in the fiction and popular adaptations of Austen. This anthology includes work by a variety of esteemed and emergent Austen scholars from around the world who engage in a dialogue on critical questions surrounding her fictional treatment of men and masculinity, such as historical (post-French Revolutionary) changes in social expectations for men and women, brothers and fathers, male lovers, soldiers and the military, queer and alternative sexualities, violence, and male devotees of Austen. The collection addresses Austen’s fiction, including her juvenilia, as well as the ongoing popular appeal of her work and the enduring Austen vogue. The work in this anthology builds on established critical discourses in Austen scholarship as well as important conversations in Masculinity Studies.

Jane Austen and Masculinity provides a diverse selection of critical essays on representations of men and masculinity in Austen's work. This anthology will attract interest from scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature as well as gender studies scholars who are interested in the widening scope of masculinity studies.

This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity – a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century – Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen’s Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen’s ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

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.

This book investigates the figure of the military man in the long eighteenth century in order to explore how ideas about militarism served as vehicles for conceptualizations of masculinity. Bringing together representations of military men and accounts of court martial proceedings, this book examines eighteenth-century arguments about masculinity and those that appealed to the 'naturally' sexed body and construed masculinity as social construction and performance. Julia Banister's discussion draws on a range of printed materials, including canonical literary and philosophical texts by David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole and Jane Austen, and texts relating to the naval trials of, amongst others, Admiral John Byng. By mapping eighteenth-century ideas about militarism, including professionalism and heroism, alongside broader cultural concerns with politeness, sensibility, the Gothic past and celebrity, Julia Banister reveals how ideas about masculinity and militarism were shaped by and within eighteenth-century culture.

In the late eighteenth-century English novel, the question of feminism has usually been explored with respect to how women writers treat their heroines and how they engage with contemporary political debates, particularly those relating to the French Revolution. Megan Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are also present in their treatment of male characters. In positing a 'Gentleman's Liberation Movement,' she suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen all used their creative powers to liberate men from the very institutions and ideas about power, society, and gender that promote the subjection of women. Their writing juxtaposes the role of women in the private spheres with men's engagement in political structures and successive wars for independence (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars). The failures associated with fighting these wars and the ideological debates surrounding them made plain, at least to these women writers, that in denying the universality of these natural freedoms, their liberating effects would be severely compromised. Thus, to win the same rights for which men fought, women writers sought to remake men as individuals freed from the tyranny of their patriarchal inheritance.

Jane Austen's Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen's ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

Studies of eighteenth-century British novels are typically centered on the alleged "rise" of the novel; that is, the formation of the novel as a genre distinguished from the epics, dramas, romances, and satires of past centuries. These new novels betray the critical trajectory of masculinity throughout the politically turbulent long British eighteenth century (1688-1815). While critics have studied individual constructions of masculinity within particular novels, or masculinity presented by a single author's corpus, this paper tracks the various constructions of masculinity and demonstrates the relationship between masculinity and political change. The novel's century-long "rise" presents the reflection of the English male society's struggle to redefine itself in the face of the economic change, social empowerment, and political turbulence that resulted from the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). The novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen reflect the direct relationship between the English political environment and turbulent trajectory and changing notions of masculinity. Defoe's Whig masculinity favors economic gain and imperial expansion and becomes apparent in Robinson Crusoe (1719). In responding to Richardson's portrayal of the gentry's abusive masculinity in Pamela (1740), Fielding presents what I term "heroic" masculinity in Joseph Andrews (1742). Sterne's 1759 critique of gentry men shows the complete lack of any traditional masculinity in what has become a totally effeminized, and thus ineffectual, asymmetric society. Finally, the anti-Jacobin, Tory Jane Austen brings a restoration of masculinity that results from a renewed interdependency of the sexes. In the neat conclusions of Austen's novels, women submit to male leadership but excel in supportive and managerial positions; men need to marry women and protect the lower ranks. This mutually rewarding synthesis reinstates the acceptable portions of traditional masculinity (while excluding cudgels and fists) and creates a norm beneficial to men and women.