num_pages: 287
description: This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and eighteenth century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet's social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers' cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market's function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.
language: English
title: Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784
titlecomplete: Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784
publisher: Palgrave Macmillan