Manliness in Britain, 1760¿1900 - Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture

Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men''s bodies - very often working-class ones - and the emotions and material culture associated with them.

The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they represented was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined workin