SOURCE: “Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope, and the Schoolboy,” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 32, No. 3, Autumn 1991, pp. 219-39.

In this essay, Straub examines the eighteenth-century practice of gendering literary authority as masculine and in that context focuses on Cibber's unusual use of the sexually ambiguous figure of the schoolboy to construct an alternative model of authority.

The trope of the schoolboy threads through a range of eighteenth-century discourses, connoting a subjected position in a homosocial, sometimes homoerotic economy of power. The spectacle of the schoolboy's bent knees or his bared ass before the corrective birch comprises a semiotic terrain upon which are continually being inscribed masculinities defined in power-relation to each other. As Foucault comments, “the sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth century—and quite apart from that of adolescents in general—a public problem. … Around the schoolboy and his sex...