Overview
- Examines the role of childlikeness and immaturity in the literary and artistic creativity of prominent boy-men of the nineteenth century
- Explores the impact that grownup-children had on the cultures of childhood and masculinity
- Analyses the transition between Romanticism and Victorianism, and the impact of Romantic conceptions of childhood upon masculine identity
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood (PSHC)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Newbon is careful throughout his book, not to over-simplify the nature of the Romantic boy-man. … Newbon’s book is engaging throughout, and if his objective was to educate the reader on the shared attributes of the Romantic boy-man, he has certainly achieved this.” (Sophie Phelps, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Issue 174, 2021)
“This is an erudite book and a valuable contribution to masculinity studies.” (Tracy Hayes, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 20 (1), 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Pete Newbon is Senior Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Authors: Pete Newbon
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40814-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-40813-6Published: 16 October 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-40814-3Published: 04 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6532
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6540
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 357
Topics: Social History, History of Britain and Ireland, Cultural History, Childhood, Adolescence and Society, Literary History