Kavanagh, Declan William
(2012)
Patriots and Fribbles: Effeminacy and Politics in
the Literature of the Seven Years’ War and its
Aftermath, 1756-1774.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This thesis examines British cultural anxieties surrounding effeminacy and
foreignness in the literature of the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, c. 1756-1772.
Primarily, it is concerned with assessing how anxiety regarding effeminacy presents as a
discourse of crisis within a diverse set of discrete, though densely worked debates,
surrounding authorial independence, freedom of the press, the electorate’s right to free
elections, and the aesthetic experience of the sublime. All of these debates shape
emergent formulations of patriotism at mid-century. Chapter One considers how the
conflation of xenophobia and effeminophobia operates as a rhetorical device in the poetry
of the satirist Charles Churchill (1731-1764). Reading Churchill’s anti-Ossian poetry, I
argue that the portrayal of the Highlander as heterosexually effeminate enables the
articulation of patriotism as heteroerotic balance. Building on this, Chapter Two analyses
the sexual and political controversies that mark the early career of the radical Whig
politician John Wilkes (1725-1795).
Taking one key narrative of Wilkite opposition, namely, the resistance in The
North Briton to the excise on cider, Chapter Three shows how the defence of a
gentleman’s property provokes debates about the nature of privacy and publicity that
enfold into the fraught discourse on effeminacy. The second part of this chapter considers
the successes and failures of two political essay-sheets, The Test and The Auditor, which
were written by Arthur Murphy during the opening and closing stages of the Seven
Years’ War. The final chapter reads the early political writings of Edmund Burke (1729-
1797) in the context of the fractious debates engendered by Wilkes’s attempts at re-entry
to political life in the late 1760s. I argue that Burke’s understanding of the sublime offers
an aesthetic response to effeminophobic and xenophobic anxieties, which has
consequences for the longer history of British imperialism.
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