The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest

The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest PDF Author: Pat Rogers
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This is the first detailed exploration of one of the earliest major poems by Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest (1713). The book reveals how Pope used the artistic conventions of the Stuart court, such as masque, architecture, allegorical painting, and heraldry to create the last great Renaissance poem in English. A coherent symbolic design is constructed around the themes of the river and the forest. Pope organizes the structure and style of the poem to create a prophetic version of nationhood, drawing on such sources as the plays of Ben Jonson, the Whitehall paintings of Rubens, the architecture of Inigo Jones, the panegyric work of Dryden, and the topographical poetry of Drayton. The political dimensions of the poem are considered in relation to the foundation of the South Sea Company in 1711, with its foreshadowing of imperial issues to come. The book will spark further interest in a poem that has been gaining increasing attention recently from writers such as E. P. Thompson and Laura Brown. It shows the centrality of Windsor-Forest in Pope's own career, and the centrality of Pope in the debates of his time. Pat Rogers is DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of

The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest

The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest PDF Author: Pat Rogers
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first detailed exploration of one of the earliest major poems by Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest (1713). The book reveals how Pope used the artistic conventions of the Stuart court, such as masque, architecture, allegorical painting, and heraldry to create the last great Renaissance poem in English. A coherent symbolic design is constructed around the themes of the river and the forest. Pope organizes the structure and style of the poem to create a prophetic version of nationhood, drawing on such sources as the plays of Ben Jonson, the Whitehall paintings of Rubens, the architecture of Inigo Jones, the panegyric work of Dryden, and the topographical poetry of Drayton. The political dimensions of the poem are considered in relation to the foundation of the South Sea Company in 1711, with its foreshadowing of imperial issues to come. The book will spark further interest in a poem that has been gaining increasing attention recently from writers such as E. P. Thompson and Laura Brown. It shows the centrality of Windsor-Forest in Pope's own career, and the centrality of Pope in the debates of his time. Pat Rogers is DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of

Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts

Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts PDF Author: Pat Rogers
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191515256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This radical new look at the literary and political climate of England during the reign of Queen Anne examines the work of the greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope. Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts provides the fullest contextual account to date of Windsor-Forest (1713), widely seen as a key text in the evolution of early eighteenth-century poetry. It examines the poem's topical and political aspects and offers a reconfiguration of Pope's early career, demonstrating that this was a pivotal period, marking a critical watershed in both his personal and literary development. The book gives a complete account of Pope's life and work in his early twenties, and supplies a new political interpretation, including a careful analysis of possible Jacobite colourings. Attention is directed towards a range of literary, historical, ideological, and artistic issues. The book draws on classical studies (the role of Virgil and Ovid especially), Renaissance scholarship, literary history, political history, and artistic contexts. The key ideas and techniques of Windsor-Forest are related to Pope's other early works, including the Pastorals and, centrally, The Rape of the Lock. Rogers goes on to reassess the poet's dealings with the Scriblerus group. He shows previously unnoted textual connections with the work of Swift, Gay, Parnell, and also Prior, and casts fresh light on the tortuous process of composition and revision of Windsor-Forest, with a description of the manuscript and an account of the publishing and textual history, while numerous allusions are traced for the first time. Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts will be of interest to scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

Secular Chains

Secular Chains PDF Author: Philip Connell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199269580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process and sheds new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688 and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

The Problem of Profit

The Problem of Profit PDF Author: Michael Genovese
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394290X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Attacks against the pursuit of profit in eighteenth-century Britain have been largely read as reactions against market activity in general or as critiques of financial innovation. In The Problem of Profit, however, Michael Genovese contends that such rejections of profit derive not from a distaste for moneymaking itself but from a distaste for individualism. In the aftermath of the late seventeenth-century Financial Revolution, literature linked the concept of sympathy to the public-minded economic ideals of the past to resist the rising individualism of capitalism. This study places literary works at the center of eighteenth-century debates about how to harmonize exchanges of feeling and exchanges of finance, highlighting representations of communitarian, affective profit-making in georgic poetry as well as in the work of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne, among others. Investigating commercial treatises, novels, poetry, periodicals, and philosophy, Genovese argues that authors conjured alternatives to private accumulation that might counter the isolating tendencies of impersonal exchange. However, even as emotional language and economic language arose together in the 1700s, the attendant aspiration to form a communitarian economy in Britain was not fulfilled. By recovering an approach to moneymaking that failed to thrive, The Problem of Profit argues for the relevance of an unfamiliar narrative of capitalistic thought to today’s anxiety over the discord between personal ambition and public good.

Alexander Pope in the Making

Alexander Pope in the Making PDF Author: Joseph Hone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192580914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
How did Alexander Pope become the greatest poet of the eighteenth century? Modern scholarship has typically taken Pope's rise to greatness and subsequent remoteness from lesser authors for granted. As a major poet he is treated as the successor of Milton and Dryden or the precursor of Wordsworth. Drawing on previously neglected texts and overlooked archival materials, Alexander Pope in the Making immerses the poet in his milieux, providing a substantial new account of Pope's early career, from the earliest traces of manuscript circulation to the publication of his collected Works and beyond. In this book, Joseph Hone illuminates classic poems such as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest by setting them alongside lesser-known texts by Pope and his contempories, many of which have never received sustained critical attention before. Pope's earliest experiments in satire, panegyric, lyric, pastoral, and epic are all explored alongside his translations, publication strategies, and neglected editorial projects. By recovering values shared by Pope and the politically heterodox men and women whose works he read and with whom he collaborated, this book constructs powerful new interpretive frameworks for some of the eighteenth century's most celebrated poems. Alexander Pope in the Making mounts a comprehensive challenge to the 'Scriblerian' paradigm that has dominated scholarship for the past eighty years. It sheds fresh light on Pope's early career and reshapes our understanding of the ideological landscape of his era. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

The Major Works

The Major Works PDF Author: Alexander Pope
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199537615
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
First published with revisions as an Oxford World's Classics paperback: 2006.

Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock'

Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' PDF Author: Don Nichol
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442669683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Alexander Pope’s heroi-comical, mock-epic poem, The Rape of the Lock, continues to sparkle after three hundred years as a peerless gem in the canon of English literature. In celebration of its tercentenary, this collection brings together ten eminent scholars with new perspectives on the poem. Their approaches reflect the vast range of interpretation of Pope’s text, from discussions of religion, gender, and eighteenth-century biological science to an interview with Sophie Gee about her novelization of the poem in The Scandal of the Season. These stimulating analyses will be essential reading for students and teachers of The Rape of the Lock and a valuable resource for investigating eighteenth-century culture.

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder PDF Author: Karen Harvey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In October 1726, newspapers began reporting a remarkable event. In the town of Godalming in Surrey, a woman called Mary Toft had started to give birth to rabbits. Several leading doctors - some sent directly by King George I - travelled to examine the woman and she was moved to London to be closer to them. By December, she had been accused of fraud and taken into custody. Mary Toft's unusual deliveries caused a media sensation. Her rabbit births were a test case for doctors trying to further their knowledge about the processes of reproduction and pregnancy. The rabbit births prompted not just public curiosity and scientific investigation, but also a vicious backlash. Based on extensive new archival research, this book is the first in-depth re-telling of this extraordinary story. Karen Harvey situates the rabbit-births within the troubled community of Godalming and the women who remained close to Mary Toft as the case unfolded, exploring the motivations of the medics who examined her, considering why the case attracted the attention of the King and powerful men in government, and following the case through the criminal justice system. The case of Mary Toft exposes huge social and cultural changes in English history. Against the backdrop of an incendiary political culture, it was a time when traditional social hierarchies were shaken, relationships between men and women were redrawn, print culture acquired a new vibrancy and irreverence, and knowledge of the body was remade. But Mary Toft's story is not just a story about the past. In reconstructing Mary's physical, social and mental world, The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder allows us to reflect critically on our own ideas about pregnancy, reproduction, and the body through the lens of the past.

Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet

Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet PDF Author: Bethan Roberts
Publisher: Romantic Reconfigurations Stud
ISBN: 1789620171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book explores Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its 'place' - understood in multiple ways - in literary history. It argues that Smith's work engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith's career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England.

We Are Kings

We Are Kings PDF Author: Spencer Jackson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
When British and American leaders today talk of the nation—whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought, and the literature that accompanied Britain’s rise to imperial prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here to a body of literature long associated with modernity’s origins without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century British literature are the products of the politicization of religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and religious at once—products of a modern political faith that has authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth century to the present.