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Chapter 1 Introduction: Male Creativity and Its Changing Contexts Discourses about male creativity were fundamentally influenced by three historical transformations: ( 1 ) a revised cultural understanding of masculinity as an interiorized sexual identity; (2) a new kind of interest in the male body as the site where masculinity would be regis­ tered, with particular emphasis on the connections between the or­ gans of generation and the mind; and (3) the commodification of the literary in an emergent capitalist print culture. The most significant result for ideas of male creativity and the poetical character was that male genitalia were increasingly seen as the symbolic commodities of both masculinity and male literary labor. More specifically, traditional creativity/procreativity tropes were affected by these transformations, and cultural understanding of the literal and figurative connections between creative male mind and reproductive systems-both male and female-were rewritten in ways that reflected newer physiological theories as well as the new economic value of literary production. The same is true for non-procreative, eroticized tropes for creativity-sexy female Muses, erections-which became rhetorical markers for the in­ ner site of one's inspiration as well as the public status of one's writing in the literary marketplace. These collective metaphorical equations played a significant role in establishing widespread associations of the male mind as sexualized body, which in turn became rhetorical com­ modities very likely to yield a profit for authors and booksellers. Pope became the first public emblem of these developments, symbolizing the new commercial traffic in the yard of wit. New Commodities: Masculinity, Male Bodies, Literary Labor How we understand the links between creativity and manliness has everything to do with basic assumptions about the defining features of masculinity for this period, which were far from stable. A� scholars know, histories of Enlightenment men and maleness are about mas­ culinities rather than a single universal type; about fluid and often permeable gender boundaries; about social, economic, and political 2 Chapter 1 forces as well as sexual behavior; about transitions and consolidations of the categories of maleness rather than transhistorical modes; and about the relationship between public representations and actual behavior. Historians seem agreed that eighteenth-century maleness was subject to a variety of new configurations and developments. Perhaps the most difficult question of all has been the debate about when and how there might have been a shift from "masculinity" understood and experi­ enced as social reputation to "masculinity" as an interiorized sense of personal identity defined increasingly by sexuality. John Tosh has framed the historical question and its interpretive difficulty concisely: All that can be said with confidence is that a fundamental shift occurred be­ tween the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries masculinity was regarded as a matter of reputation; it had first to be earned from one's peers and then guarded jealously against defamation. . . . In the twentieth century, by contrast, masculinity has come to be experienced as an aspect of subjectivity, sensitive to social codes no doubt, but rooted in the individual's interiority; an "insecure" masculinity is one which is assailed by inner doubt (particularly about sexuality) rather than by threats and aspersions from other men. . . . Was the period 1750-1850, so crucial for the development of class identities, also critical in the gradual tran­ sition fi'om masculinity as reputation to masculinity as interiority?1 At first glance, one might be tempted to say "yes," and then look for specific discursive evidence and individual case studies which would substantiate the general claim that the eighteenth century witnesses the emergence of a new configuration for masculine identity in which selfhood becomes an internalized sexual identity variously construed across a range of acceptable and transgressive modes. Anthony Fletcher has made such arguments easier by pointing out "that the word mas­ culinity, meaning 'the quality or condition of being masculine,' had its first recorded usage in England in 1 748." His acknowledgment that " New words enter the language as people feel the insufficiency of cur­ rent speech to express something they want to encapsulate" might suggest that the word enters common usage precisely in order to name this new sense of interiority. But Fletcher also cautions us about the difficulties of proof: " How far among men living in the Victorian period, let alone during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it [masculinity] involved an internalised identity-an interiority of the mind and emotions-as opposed to a sense of role-playing-is very hard for the...

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