A Genealogy Of The Gentleman

A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their narrative constructions of the gentleman. It challenges two latent critical assumptions: first, that the gentleman’s masculinity is normative, private, and therefore oppositional to concepts of performance; and second, that women writers, from their disadvantaged position within a patriarchal society, had no real means of influencing dominant structures of masculinity. By placing writers such as Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author—Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Richardson—Mary Beth Harris shows how these women carved out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and appeal were dependent on women’s influence. Ultimately, this project considers the import of these women writers’ legacy, both progressive and conservative, on hegemonic standards of masculinity that persist to this day.

The Gentleman's Magazine was founded in London in 1731. The first publication of its type, it featured a broad mix of news, essays, poetry, parliamentary debates, book reviews, and antiquarian notes.For the genealogist it is an absolute treaure-house of useful data. From the beginning the magazine published notices of births, deaths, and marriages, enabling people throughout the English-speaking world to keep abreast of friends and relatives at home and abroad. About 6,000 of these notices relate to persons in North America and the West Indies, and these have been extracted for this compilation. Among the many fascinating notices are those relating to the deaths of American Loyalists in England and to marriages nad deaths in America of "younger sons" of the English gentry and nobility.

A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through narrative constructions of the gentleman in courtship novels. This codification of the gentleman allowed women authors to carve out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society's patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and hegemonic power were dependent on women's influence.

The "Gentleman's magazine" section is a digest of selections from the weekly press; the "(Trader's) monthly intelligencer" section consists of news (foreign and domestic), vital statistics, a register of the month's new publications, and a calendar of forthcoming trade fairs.