Abstract:

This dissertation complicates critically received ideas concerning gender studies within British Romanticism. Since the mid-1980's, literary critics have consistently understood masculinity in either bourgeois or aristocratic terms. In this project, I argue that we ought to question how the basic categories of masculinity, Romanticism, and British identity have been understood.

This project contextualizes how we can understand narratives of British masculinity within a perspective that is attuned to recent critical trends that attend to imperialism and globalization. Specifically, I focus on how literary works within the historical period of 1780 to 1830 reflect these changes and what sorts of identity formations result. I propose that there are multiple kinds of masculine identity within this period, and that it is important to understand this complexity as reflected in various literary and cultural products. Hence, I question the dominant narratives of masculinity, and focus instead on the ways that masculinity is implicated in chivalric, plebian, effeminate, eastern, and Afro-Caribbean identities. Peripheral communities, local and global, resist dominant norms.

Each chapter reflects another aspect of this argument. The first chapter introduces the problem of masculinity within the Romantic period. The second chapter, "Resisting Modernity: Chivalric Masculinity and Nostalgia," focuses centrally on the political and gender debates that swirled around Edmund Burke's Reflections . The third chapter, "Segmented Males: Caleb's Flight and the Dismemberment of Character," attends to the complexity of masculinity and class as represented in William Godwin's novel, Caleb Williams . The fourth chapter, "Refashioning Revolution: Inter-Subjective Modalities of Female Novelists in the 1790s," explores how Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth use the discourse of sensibility to revalue male and female relations even as they reflect the political and social issues of the day. The fifth chapter, "Relics of War: Wounded Soldiers and Ballad culture," focuses centrally on the depiction of soldiers and workers within the ballads written during this period. They offer some form of resistance to narratives of nationalism. The sixth chapter, "Entanglements in the East: Byron's Re-valuation of British Masculine Identity," focuses on Lord Byron's complex engagement with Orientalist discourse even as he revalues various effeminate modes of masculinity. The seventh and final chapter, "Afro-Caribbean British Writers: Transatlantic and Cosmopolitan Masculinity," focuses on the writers who originate within the circumference of Britain's Caribbean and analyzes the various ways they engage with dominant modes of British masculinity.