Becoming the Gentleman

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 1-10

3. Gentlemen and Their Knowledge of the World

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 11-39

4. The Politics of Alexander Pope’s Urbanity

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 41-63

5. The Dissemination of Knowledge of the World from The Connoisseur to Evelina

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 65-90

6. Austen’s Fiction in the Age of Commerce

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 91-110

7. Sir Walter Scott and the Gentrification of Empire

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 111-140

8. Conclusion

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 141-143

9. Postscript: Old Sir Walter

   • Jason D. Solinger

   Pages 145-150

10. Back Matter

    Pages 151-191

    PDF

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.

• English literature
• fiction
• Jane Austen
• British and Irish Literature

"Solinger's encyclopedic reference to primary and secondary sources make this book a state-of-the-art reconsideration of the period and a valuable resource. Summing up: Highly recommended." - CHOICE

"It is a real pleasure to read amonograph so firmly in control of the argument it develops. In addition to illuminating the covert politics of eighteenth-century literature, this study provides an important prehistory to the current state of ''liberal education' and our own presumptions about how learning and literacy contribute to social life." - Novel

"Solinger's study makes a valuable contribution to the broader scholarship on modern masculine identity by tracing its emergence from a historically specific and culturally stable, yet at the same time highly malleable figure that of 'the

gentleman'.' - Eighteenth-Century Fiction

"As Solinger so deftly argues, no figure is more central to the transition into modernity than the modern British gentleman. Incorporating facets of traditional masculinity within forms increasingly independent of inherited status and ever more widely accessible through popular literature, the gentleman becomes the lynchpin of modern bourgeois culture and of British imperialism. Tracing the trope 'knowledge of the world' through neoclassical poetry, educational treatises, the periodical, and the novel, Solinger shows how modern gentility increasingly becomes an effect of literacy. Resolutely historical and syntheticin its survey, Becoming the Gentleman illuminates the presence of the past in eighteenth-century cultural production and knits back together the gendered strands - masculine and feminine - of the modern subject." - Erin Mackie, Syracuse University

Jason D. Solinger is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, USA.

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