The Yard of Wit Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 Raymond
Stephanson "Raymond Stephanson configures masculinity and its
expressions in male creativity historically, biographically, and in
sufficient deep-layer detail to persuade the most rigorous of
scholars that this work will be a reliable source of enduring
worth."--George Rousseau, De Montfort University "The volume
constantly surprises with new material or new readings of familiar
material, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone
interested in the literary manifestation of the history of
sexuality in the Restoration and eighteenth century."--"Journal of
the History of Sexuality" Literary composition is more than an
intellectual affair. Poetry has long been said to spring from the
heart, while aspiring writers are frequently encouraged to write
"from the gut." Still another formulation likens the poetic
imagination to the pregnant womb, in spite of the fact that most
poets historically have been male. Offering a rather different set
of arguments about the forces that shape creativity, Raymond
Stephanson examines how male writers of the Enlightenment imagined
the origins, nature, and structures of their own creative impulses
as residing in their virility. For Stephanson, the links between
male writing, the social contexts of masculinity, and the male
body--particularly the genitalia--played a significant role in the
self-fashioning of several generations of male authors. Positioning
sexuality as a volatile mechanism in the development of creative
energy, "The Yard of Wit" explains why male writers associated
their authorial work--both the internal site of creativity and its
status in public--with their genitalia and reproductive and erotic
acts, and how these gestures functioned in the new marketplace of
letters. Using the figure and writings of Alexander Pope as a
touchstone, Stephanson offers an inspired reading of an important
historical convergence, a double commodification of male creativity
and of masculinity as the sexualized male body. In considering how
literary discourses about male creativity are linked to larger
cultural formations, this elegant, enlightening book offers new
insight into sex and gender, maleness and masculinity, and the
intricate relationship between the male body and mind. Raymond
Stephanson is Professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan. Essays of his have been published on Alexander Pope,
Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett,
and Elizabethan prose fiction. 2003 312 pages 6 x 9 13 illus. ISBN
978-0-8122-3758-0 Cloth $69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0366-0 Ebook
$69.95s 45.50 World Rights Literature Short copy: "Raymond
Stephanson configures masculinity and its expressions in male
creativity historically, biographically, and in sufficient
deep-layer detail to persuade the most rigorous of scholars that
this work will be a reliable source of enduring worth."--George
Rousseau, De Montfort University
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