Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-352) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: too much of the boy-man -- Self-incurred immaturity -- Literary origins: Sterne, Rousseau, Chatterton and Wordsworth -- Namby-pamby Wordsworth -- The marks of infancy were burned into him -- 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 -- Farewell to Skimpole: romantic boy-men and canonical occlusion.
Summary:
"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"--Back cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.