This is the first of two volumes which will make available in convenient form the annual bibliographies of 18th century scholarship published for the past 25 years in the Philological Quarterly. Volume 1 includes the years 1926-1938. By means of lithography the original issues are exactly reproduced with retention of all critical annotations. Originally published in 1950. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This critical biography places Pope’s life and poetry in the context of the political state of Britain following the Revolution of 1688. It gives close readings of Pope’s major poems, including the less commonly discussed translations of Homer. Frequent resort is made to Pope’s letters, including new items. A final chapter discusses Pope’s literary reputation in the later eighteenth-century.
This is Volume VI of nine in collection on Historical Sociology. Originally published in 1948, volume includes the writings of John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison from 1660 to 1744.
This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and eighteenth century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet's social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of masculinity: the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers' cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market's function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.
Abiezer Coppe is one of the most exciting writers of the seventeenth century, full of urgency and passion, righteous indignation, humour, fury, wit and naked sincerity; an extraordinary writer by any measure. He does not fit easily in the canons of Literature but nevertheless has been studied by both historians such as Christopher Hill and literary scholars including Nigel Smith, reprinted in the 20th Century in various forms and even included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, a tradition he would certainly reject. Within the tradition to which he declares his loyalty, that of the Prophetic religious writers and the Fathers of the Church, he either associates himself with or frequently incorporates writings ascribed to Paul of Tarsus, John of Patmos, King David, Solomon, Hosea, Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Christ. He is not afraid to speak directly in the voice of God to condemn the hypocrisy and corruption of his era. Coppe’s range of expressive strategies has led to confusion among commentators: Thomas Corns justly describes a "ludic and simultaneously aggressive idiom". Such extremes are characteristic of highly charged satirical writing such as Coppe’s. Nashe and Swift’s extremes are no less, although both come from the other side of a profound religious and philosophical divide. Coppe’s stance and style, extraordinary as they are, are not without precedent: they participate in Bakhtin’s “Apocalyptic Time”; the time when everything is about to happen.
“Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher.”—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age “What sets Rogers’s history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat.”—Publishers Weekly The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles, and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.
In Estranging the Familiar, G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay, the form critical writing once took and the form that is now enjoying a resurgence of popularity and excellence. Atkins contends that to reach a general audience, criticism must move away from the impersonality of modern criticism and contemporary theory without embracing the old-fashioned essay. "The venerable familiar essay may remain the basis," Atkins writes, "but its conventional openness, receptivity, and capaciousness must extend to theory, philosophy, and the candor that seems to mark the tail-end of the twentieth century." In noting the timeliness, if not the necessity, of a return to the essay, Atkins also considers our culture's parallel "return to the personal." When the essay combines good writing with the concerns of the personal, Atkins says, it becomes a form of criticism that is readable, vital, and potentially attractive to a large readership. Atkins hopes critics will tap into the revitalized interest the essay now enjoys without ignoring the considerable insights and advances of contemporary theory. He argues that despite claims to the contrary there is no inherent incompatibility between the essay and modern theory. As Atkins considers various experiments in critical writing from Plato to the present, notably feminist interest in the personal and autobiographical, he contends that these attempts, although undeniably important, fall short of the desired goal when they emphasize the merely expressive and neglect the artful quality good writing can bring to personal criticism. The final third of the book consists of a series of experiments in critical writing that represent the author's own attempts to bridge the gap between theory and popular criticism, between an academic and a general audience. In essays that illustrate the rhetorical power of the form, Atkins describes the reciprocal relationship between his life experience and a reading of The Odyssey, explains the role that theory has played in his personal development, and chronicles his attempts to find a voice as a writer.
Dead Masters examines the dual issues of mentoring and intertextuality as an integrated phenomenon. Through a series of fresh and novel readings of Johnsonian and Boswellian texts, the book further advances our awareness of the formal complexities of Johnson's writings and the psychological substratum from which they issue.
