Renaissance
Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia
By , University of Louisiana at Lafayette (February 2005)
Sections: Renaissance
Subject: Literature.
People: Sidney, Sir Philip.
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1500-1599, 1600-1699.
Key Topics: pastoral, gender, poetry, identity, race, sexuality, Renaissance, The.
Abstract
This essay explores the topic of masculinity and emotion, which has generated a considerable amount of scholarly interest over the past decade, in relation to men who weep and wail in Sir Philip Sidney's New Arcadia (1593). Sidney's romance reflects shifting definitions of manhood toward the end of the sixteenth century when aristocratic men tended to define themselves less as warriors and more as humanists, statesmen, and emotionally expressive courtiers. He alludes to the increasing remoteness of the feudal ideal of the violent warrior by exposing the futility rather than glory of armed violence in some cases and by using the term “armor” in a figurative rather than literal sense. A number of men in the New Arcadia tell stories as well as fight and exhibit a broad range of emotions – desire, rage, pity, and grief. Thoughtful men of action who know when and where to cry are ideal in Sidney's romance.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00120.x
This article abstract has been viewed 5011 times.
Top 5 related articles
-
Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia
By , University of Louisiana at Lafayette
(Literature Compass 2008, August 2008)
Literature Compass -
The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys Across Spaces and Times
By , University of Newcastle upon Tyne
(Vol. 3, June 2006)
Literature Compass -
The Development of the English Love Lyric, 1580–1680
By , Temple University
(Vol. 3, April 2006)
Literature Compass -
“I Can neither Write nor Be Silent:” The Circulation of Women's Texts in Sidney's Old Arcadia*
By , Yale University
(Vol. 3, February 2006)
Literature Compass -
Recent Critical Approaches to Sidney's Literary Production
By , University of Sheffield
(Vol. 2, January 2005)
Literature Compass
Top 5 Related Blackwell Reference Chapters
Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman
According to her biographer, Hemans's Records of Woman was the collection by which she was ‘most universally ...
By Adam Roberts
Sexuality and Love
We all know, or think we know, what sex is: that so varied but unmistakable pleasure that may issue in ...
By John Maynard
A Loving Gentleman and the Corncob Man: Faulkner, Gender, Sexuality, and The Reivers
Meta Carpenter, William Faulkner's Hollywood lover, called her memoir of their affair A Loving Gentleman ...
By Anne Goodwyn Jones
Form and Identity in Northern Irish Poetry
The rubric of Britishness describes only partially and contentiously the poetic field of Northern Irish ...
By John P. Waters
From A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry
Ovid in Renaissance English Literature
It is hard to imagine what the shape of English Renaissance literature might be, if Tudor and Stuart ...
By Heather James
From A Companion to Ovid