Book Description
Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable characterDSambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonisticDSthey also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its tragedies and exiles, its loves, its scandals, the movement of its religious, political, and philosophical ideas, its sense of poetry, and its notions of poetic craft and genre. Moreover, Pope published a collection of his own letters: a selective and highly edited collection, in which (having retrieved the originals from some recipients) he revised their texts and on occasion claimed they had been written to other people. This came to light with the nineteenth-century discovery of transcripts of the original letters, made for Pope's correspondent Lord Caryll. Other letters preserved in the British Library's Homer MS are clearly ones the poet would not have chosen to keep, since he used their backs for drafts of his Iliad translation. George Sherburn's scholarly five-volume Collected Correspondence (Oxford, 1956) is the necessary basis for any new edition. The collection presented here is in the first place a balanced and varied selection from Sherburn. Since 1956, however, many new letters have been discovered, and this volume includes most of them. Many are among Pope's best, though they have till now been scattered in learned journals.This selection supplies an introduction, a commentary on each letter identifying allusions and quotations (with translations where necessary), and thematic and biographical indexes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A solid collection for the scholar
This is a good collection of Pope's letters.Erskine-Hill not only does a splendid job of editing and footnoting to capture the sense of who Pope was as a friend, counselor, and a man, but also provides a research-friendly cross-referenced bibliographical index. ... Read more

Book Description
This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing.The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents. ... Read more

Book Description
Leading literary historian and eighteenth-century specialist Pat Rogers has long been recognized as an authority on Alexander Pope.This book addresses the many facets of the poet's world and work, presenting a substantial new essay on "Pope and the antiquarians" alongside considerably revised versions of essays published in journals, which together cover most of Pope's major writing. Essays on Pope gathers for the first time the best work on this celebrated author by one of the foremost critics, and is an indispensable resource for scholars of eighteenth-century literature. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
In the last three decades, the best work on Alexander Pope has been contextual and biographical. Without relegating the understanding of Pope gained by such study, this volume seeks to point the way back from context to text - from Pope's world to a fresh exploration of his verbal artistry, and the subtle processes of his composition and revision, from manuscripts to the various stages of print. The six papers in this volume focus on topics and issues important to Pope but rarely discussed. They range from Howard Erskine-Hill's exploration of Pope's work in relation to slavery (the leading human issue of the time), to Hester Jones's subtle examination of the non-sexual relation between female and male. The book explores several quite new aspects of Pope, as well as looking afresh at features of his work which are perennially important. ... Read more

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Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

The way literature should be done!
This review should be taken seriously considering I didn't really like "The Rape of the Lock" and still give this book 5 stars!

"History is not a vacuum," one of my university history professors always told us.Neither is literature for that matter!This book examines the mock-epic poem "Rape of the Lock" in its social, literary, and historical contexts.The poem takes up a small portion of the book, and the rest is made up of diary entries, letters, essays, newspapers, etc. that help to explain the culture surrounding Pope.The city of London, clothes, card games, coffee, makeup, social norms, and countless other things are discussed in very readable and enjoyable ways in order to make "The Rape of the Lock" truly come alive.

The ultimate "mock epic"
This poem serves two purposes.First, Pope wrote it in response to an upper-class quarrel over an event at a party in which a young girl had her hair cut.The incident itself was petty and stupid, but the families of the parties involved were taking it very seriously.Pope, then, wrote this poem in epic form (the most grand of poetic forms) to show the absurdity of the matter, and thus reconcile the offender and offended.

That is the first function of this poem.Even though the incident is long forgotten, the poem is still very funny.But there is a greater purpose to this poem--it was written like an epic.It contains several epic elements--an epic battle (at the card game), the invocation of muses and gods, the epic quest (to cut the hair), and several literary devices, such as epic-length similes and catalogs.This is what makes this poem so great, and what serves as a testimony to Pope's remarkable genius for wit and satire.

Pope was, in my opinion, one of the greatest English poets, certainly the greatest satirist.This is one of his greatest works, and it is short enough to read over and over again without investing too much time.

Brilliantly written with wit, style, and a flair for detail.
This is a highly intelligent book on one of the finest poems by the eighteenth century's most celebrated poet.Brilliantly written with wit, style, and a flair for interesting detail, Wall's book includes textual informationand a wealth of carefully selected secondary material that makes this "one-stop shopping" for anyone interested in the work or indeed in the period.Because of its combination of lively writing and scholarly erudition, I would recommend Wall's book for a wide variety of interest and knowledge levels.Wonderful Bedford series idea and terrific book. ... Read more

Book Description
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the most important English poet of the 18th century, as well as an essayist, satirist, and critic. Many of his sayings are still quoted today. His Essay on Criticism shaped the aesthetic views of English Neoclassicism, while his Essay on Man reflected the moral views of the Enlightenment. He participated fully in the critical debates of his time and was one of the few poets who supported himself through his writing. This reference conveniently summarizes his life and works. Included are several-hundred alphabetically arranged entries on:

Book Description
What can a study of Pope tell us about the eighteenth century?
Was Pope the poet of reason, or an anti-establishment prophet?
So many questions surround the key figures in the English literary canon, but most books focus on one aspect of an author's life or work, or limit themselves to a single critical approach, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope is part of a unique series of comprehensive, user-friendly introductions which:
offers basic information on an author's life, contexts, and works
outline the major critical issues surrounding the author's works, from the time they were written to the present
leave judgments up to you, by explaining the full range of often very difficult critical views and interpretations
offer guides to further reading in each area discussed.
This series has a broad focus but one very clear aim: to equip you with allthe knowledge you need to make your own new readings of crucial literary texts.Download Description
A comprehensive, user-friendly introduction to Alexander Pope's life and works, outlining the major critical issues and offering guides to further reading. ... Read more

Book Description
How was Alexander Pope's personal experience of women transformed into poetry? How characteristic of his age was Pope's attitude toward women? What was the influence of individual women such as his mother, Patty Blount and Lady Mary Montagu on his life and work? Valerie Rumbold's is the first full-length study to address these issues. Referring to previously unexploited manuscripts, she focuses both on Pope's own life and art, and on early eighteenth-century assumptions about women and gender. She offers readings of some of the well-known poems in which women feature prominently, and follows Pope's response throughout his writings in general. The poet's own alienation from the dominant culture (through religion, politics and physical handicap), and his troubled fascination with certain kinds of women, make this subject complex and compelling, with wide implications. Dr. Rumbold provides new insight, and shows how women with whom Pope dealt can themselves be seen as individuals with presence and dignity. ... Read more

Book Description
Throughout his life, Pope was fascinated by print. He loved its elements: dropped heads, italics, small capitals; fine paper and good ink; headpieces, tailpieces, initials, and plates.And he loved playing games with publication: anonymity, pseudonymity, false imprints, fake title-pages, advertisements, special editions, and variant texts.This is the first study to take Pope's experiments in print as a guide to interpretation. Each chapter is devoted to a particular book or text and focuses on how Pope expresses meaning through print. The Rape of the Lock, Dunciad Variorum, Essay on Man, early imitations of Horace, and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot are read through their illustrations, annotations, parallel texts, title-pages, and revisions. Independent chapters are devoted to Pope's Works of 1717 and 1735-6, discussing his self-presentation and his relation to his readers. He emerges from the study as a figure marginalized socially, politically, and sexually, an author who gambles with his private life in confronting his opponents. ... Read more