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Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial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.
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