The single life : unpatriarchal manhoods in English Renaissance literature / Jordan Windholz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Windholz, Jordan, 1982- author.

Series:

Strode studies in early modern literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Single men in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Masculinity in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Other Title:

Unpatriarchal manhoods in English Renaissance literature

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2025]

Summary:

"What if the Renaissance bachelor wasn’t just a social outlier but a literary lens through which early modern masculinity reveals its cracks? In The Single Life: Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance Literature, Jordan Windholz examines the overlooked and often subversive roles played by never-married men in shaping gender, sexuality, and social order.Windholz challenges conventional views on gender and sexuality, identifying five archetypes of bachelorhood that complicate our understanding of patriarchal success: the chaste youth, the journeyman bachelor, the true gallant, the incel scholar, and the unmarried eunuch. These figures don’t conform to ideals of marriage, legacy, or economic productivity, but they also weren’t merely left behind. Instead, they served to define what early modern society valued by embodying what it resisted. Windholz shows how Renaissance texts constructed, contained, and occasionally celebrated these “unpatriarchal manhoods.”By examining the intersections of sexuality, labor, gentility, emotion, and gender, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how single men both upheld and resisted patriarchal norms. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of literary texts, blending historical and literary analysis with feminist and queer theory. The first study of its kind, Windholz’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance literature, gender studies, or those looking to understand the margins of masculinity and the meanings of singledom—then and now."-- From JSTOR.

Contents:

City of sexual danger, city of sexual delight

Love, sex, and vigilance

Consent, coercion, and true romance

Being together

Using sex

Shameless love

The single life of the chaste youth: early modern asexuality and the naturalization of desire in all’s well that ends well

The single life of the journeyman bachelor: paronomasia and communities of labor outside (and inside) much ado about nothing

The single life of the true gallant: economic men and entrepreneurial action in epicene and wit at severall weapons

The single life of the incel scholar: feelings of entitlement in hamlet and the anatomy of melancholy

The single life of the unmarried eunuch: elaborations of gendered embodiment in mikrokosmographia, twelfth night, and the roaring girl

The renaissance of the single life in the amatonormative renaissance.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (JSTOR, viewed May 4, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Windholz, Jordan. Single life.

ISBN:

9780817395704

0817395709

OCLC:

1526499814

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license