Overview

This book focuses on men's bodies, emotions and material culture to offer a new understanding of masculinities in Britain in the long nineteenth century. This book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men's bodies - often working-class ones - and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.

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9781526128577

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'Joanne Begiato's Manliness in Britain, 1760-1900 breaks new ground in exploring manliness in Britain as an expansive body of gendered meanings that was most fully elaborated by representatives of the middle class but was also deeply resonant with the working class. [...] Overall, this is a virtuoso deployment of three interlinked strands in the new cultural history: the somatic, the material, and the emotional. That conceptual range has made possible a book on manliness unrivaled in its contextual range and its interpretive insights.' Journal of British Studies -- .

Author Information

Joanne Begiato is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange at Oxford Brookes University

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