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Author Willan, Claude, author.

Title Literary authority : an eighteenth-century genealogy / Claude Willan
Published Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 316 pages) : illustrations
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 -- Johnson's struggle with Pope -- Coda
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, and what could we use it for, he provocatively asks"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 14, 2023)
Subject Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc
Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc
SUBJECT Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784 fast
Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 fast
Subject Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
English literature
Politics and literature
Great Britain
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2022025215
ISBN 9781503635272
1503635279