Manly Writing

A critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition. By tracing the persistence of gender issues in rhetoric and composition texts, Brody argues that the seemingly innocuous, unpretentious, and often homespun advice teachers and textbook authors typically have given to fledgling writers is in fact part of a complex agenda for maintaining power. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This edited volume explores the nature of writing groups inside and outside the academic environment. For writing instructors, writing center directors & scholars researching writing groups.

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the fear that Britain had become too effeminate to protect itself against the anarchic forces unleashed by the French Revolution produced in many British writers of the period a desire to portray strong leaders who could control the democratic and commercial forces of modernization. While it is commonplace in Romantic studies to emphasize that Romantic writers are interested in the solitary genius or hero who separates himself from the community to pursue his own creative visions, Daniela Garofalo argues instead that Romantic and early Victorian writers are interested in charismatic males—military heroes, tyrants, kings, and captains of industry—who organize modern political and economic communities, sometimes by example, and sometimes by direct engagement. Reading works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, and Charlotte Brontë, Garofalo shows how these leaders, endowed with an inherent virility rather than simply inherited rank, legitimize hierarchy anew for an age suffering from a crisis of authority.

A KEY TO THE MYSTERIES No other book in history has done more to clarify the Esoteric, mystical, and occult traditions of the world than Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Now, historian Mitch Horowitz provides the first companion work to Hall’s opus. The Secret Teachings of All Ages helps twenty=first-century readers enter and experience (or re-experience) Hall’s hallowed pages and also clarifies and expands on some of the book’s key themes and topics. Mitch explores developments and historical discoveries since hall published his “Great Book” nearly a century ago and adds fresh dimensions to subjects including: The antiquity and legacy of Ancient Egypt. The mystical origins of the world’s major faiths. Strange beasts and anomalies in history and today. The origins and esotericism of Tarot. Secret Societies in Myth and Fact. The enduring relevance of astrology. Authorized by Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society, The Secret Teachings of All Ages is a feast of esoteric exploration on its own and a worthy companion to history’s unparalleled encyclopedia arcana. “Mitch is a fantastic tour guide to the fringes of reason, high weirdness, deep esoterica, secret societies, and mystery religions.” –BoingBoing “Has the rare gift of making the esoteric accessible to discerning masses.” –HuffPost

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him—Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. P. Morgan'—and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy."—from the Afterword to the Updated EditionElliott J. Gorn's The Manly Art tells the story of boxing's origins and the sport's place in American culture. When first published in 1986, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other.This updated edition of Gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, gender, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation.

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times. This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography. Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.