Becoming the Gentlemanexplains why British men and women in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. It argues that our modern conceptions of gender, class and labor came into view in the course of redefining masculine gentility. Supplementing recent work on femininity, this book not only identifies a corpus of texts that address masculinity-male conduct books, novels, poems and an entire magazine industry-it also provides a corrective lens by historicizing a masculine figure that has been regarded as unchanging. Becoming the Gentlemanidentifies this effort to redefine the gentleman as a struggle over cultural capital conducted discursively. A synthetic study of literary (e.g. Addison, Pope, Burney, Austen & Scott) and extra-literary texts (e.g. Locke, Adam Smith, and diverse instructional authors), the book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of history, literature, gender, education, and culture
Gentlemen and their Knowledge of the World -- The Politics of Alexander Pope's Urbanity -- Popular Writing and the Promise of Gentility from "The Connoisseur" to "Evelina" -- Austen's Fiction in the Age of Commerce -- Sir Walter Scott and the Gentrification of Empire
