Literary authority : an eighteenth-century genealogy / Claude Willan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Willan, Claude, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Pope, Alexander.

Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Johnson, Samuel.

Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784.

Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Politics and literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Great Britain.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

ix, 316 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023.

Summary:

"This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, he asks, and what could we use it for?" -- Page [4] of cover.

Contents:

Introduction

Whig prose cultures

"I love with all my heart" : Jacobite poetry in manuscript

Dipt in ink : Pope without "Pope" in his early career

Pope's moderate ascendancy

Samuel Johnson's struggle with Pope

Coda.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Willan, Claude. Literary authority.

ISBN:

9781503630864

1503630862

OCLC:

1336701876