Becoming the Gentleman

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.

"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.