Product Description

Three hundred years of novels, plays, paintings and films have etched into the popular imagination contradictory images of the pirate as both arch-criminal and anti-hero. How did the pirate - a real threat to mercantilism and trade in early-modern Britain - become the hypermasculine anti-hero familiar through popular culture? And how did the pirate's world, marked as it was by sexual and economic transgression, come to capture the collective imagination? This study examines the homoerotic and other culturally-transgressive aspects of the pirate's world, and the prurient fascination it has attracted. The author uses historical documents, trial records and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as "Robinson Crusoe", to trace the birth and development of the pirate image and to consider its implications for changing notions of self, masculinity and sexuality in the modern era.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198216 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 199 pages

Customer Reviews

Fascinating, Timeless
I must disagree with the narcissitic assessment of other readers and point out that Professor Turley gives us the pirate tradition in a refreshingly vivid and informed historical frame. He does not, as some recent pop philosophers have, merely appropriate this complicated and obscure realm of masculinity to posit as some kind of ahistorical arcadia. Instead, peppering his account with the thrilling vocabulary of original pirate narratives, Turley brilliantly offers the pirate example as a prism through which our current agonizing over narrative and gender can be usefully refracted. Scholarhship this lively, impassioned, and deeply informed is all too rare. Bravo, Professor Turley!

Shiver me timbers!!
This book brought home, in a very real sense my experiences growing up in a sea-going family. Oh, how I longed for the days of swashbuckling and hotbunking. A bit too graphic, perhaps, for the faint of heart. Overall, a good effort.