This book investigates slavery in the work of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. These writers were connected with a Tory ministry, which attempted to increase the English share of the international slave trade.
The writings and satire of Pope and Swift have aroused intense hostilities in women readers and feminists, both in their own day and ours, for their allegedly unsympathetic treatment of women. They have been accused of indifference to the plight of eighteenth-century women in a patriarchal society and even of exhibiting sexist and misogynistic attitudes in the case of the eighteenth-century woman writer.
"Miscellanies in Prose and Verse" (1727-32) contained contributions by three of the leading satirists of the early 18th century, published at the time when all three were at the height of their powers. This edition contains the contributions of Alexander Pope, Jonathon Swift and John Gay.
1. Wotton vs. Temple -- 2. Bentley vs. Christ Church -- 3. Stroke and Counterstroke -- 4. The Querelle -- 5. Ancient Greece and Modern Scholarship -- 6. Pope's Iliad -- 7. Pope and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns -- 8. Bentley's Milton -- 9. History and Theory -- 10. Ancients -- 11. Moderns -- 12. Ancients and Moderns.
“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.