An examination into the homoerotic and other transgressive aspects of the pirate's world
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 Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, to track the birth and development of the pirate image and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.

Examines the homoerotic and other culturally transgressive aspects of the pirate's world

About the Author
Hans Turley was Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Reviews
"A splendid account of piracy as a historical and cultural production of emerging modern culture. 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. Haggerty,University of California, Riverside
"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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780814782248
Author Hans Turley
Format Paperback
Page Count 184
Imprint New York University Press
Publisher New York University Press
Weight(grams) 318g