Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity
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Despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of actual knowledge about pirates, an immense architecture of cultural mythology has arisen around them. 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. 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. Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, to track the birth and development of the pirate image and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.BooknewsTurley (English, U. of Connecticut at Storrs) offers homoerotic readings of several works attributed to Daniel Defoe, including (1724), (1720), and (1720). He includes many intriguing details of pirate life gleaned from historical sources and from other 18th-century literature. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)
PrefaceIntroduction: A Merry Life and a Short One11Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth-Century Ship102Hostis Humani Generis: The Common Enemy against All Mankind283Trial Records, Last Words, and Other Ephemera: The Literary Artifacts of Piracy444Captain Avery and the Making of an Antihero625Fabricated by the Frail Hand of Man: The General History and Fictional Reality736A Brave, a Just, an Innocent, and a Noble Cause927Solemn Imprecations and Curses: Captain Singleton's Search for Identity1098Robinson Crusoe and "True Christian" Identity128Notes159Bibliography179Index195About the Author199
