Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.61 (604 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0814782248 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-11-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Not for everyone Rachel E. Pollock This is a very dry, dense, academic book that attempts to analyze what the author refers to as "sodomitical activity" in the golden age of piracy based on source documents original to the period. It is slow reading, and if you're looking for lurid gay sex and rampant queerness among pirates, just stick . Deconstructionist Rubbish A Customer Some people may enjoy rewriting history to suit modern prejudices; I find it revolting, and this book is a perfect example of the phenomenon. It is at best a poorly organized and incomplete review of the era of piracy; at worst, it is a pathetic attempt to impose the author's misconceived ideas on reali
Despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of actual knowledge about pirates, an immense architecture of cultural mythology has arisen around them. How did the pirate-a real threat to mercantilism and trade in early-modern Britain-become the hypermasculine anti-hero familiar to us through a variety of pop culture outlets? How did the pirate's world, marked as it was by sexual and economic transgression, come to capture our collective imagination?In Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, Hans Turley delves deep into the archives to examine the homoerotic and other culturally transgressive aspects of the pirate's world and our prurient fascination with it. Three hundred years of novels, plays, painting, and movies have etched into the popular imagination contradictory images of the pirate as both arch-criminal and anti-hero par excellence. Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, to track the birth and development of the pirate image and to show its implications for changing notions of self, masculinity, and sexuality in the modern era.Turley's wide-ranging analysis provides a new kind of history of both piracy and desire, articulating the meaning of the pirate's contradictory image to literary, cultural, and historical studies.
Haggerty,University of California, Riverside . Hans Turley shows the ways in which sodomy and piracy are inextricable from the cultural imagination of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, encourages us to rethink not only pirate history, but the history of sexuality as well."-George E. "No simplifying on my part will do justice to Turley's exhaustive readings and display of complex ideas.”-Left History 8.1"Turley presents a thoroughly-researched literay and cultural history of the transgressive pirate figure in the early eighteenth-century." -Journal of Folklore Research"A splendid account of piracy as a historical and cultural production
Hans Turley was Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.