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 DrArbuthnot 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.

This study interprets eighteenth-century satire’s famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment’s "ocularcentric" epistemological paradigms, as well as to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly "visual" — a moment at which widespread attention was being paid, for the first time, to format, layout, and eye-catching advertising strategies. On the one hand, the Augustans were convinced of the ability of their elaborately printed texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers’ physical but also moral vision. On the other hand, they feared that an overly scrutinizing gaze might undermine the viewer’s natural faculty for candor and sympathy, delight and desire. In readings of Pope, Swift, and Montagu, Mannheimer shows how this distrust of the empirical gaze led to a reconsideration of the ethics, and most specifically the gender politics, of ocularcentrism. Whereas Montagu effected this reconsideration by directly satirizing both the era’s faith in the visual and its attendant publishing strategies, Pope and Swift pursued their critique via print itself: thus whether via facing-page translations, fictional editors, or disingenuous footnotes, these writers sought to ensure that typography never became either a mere tool of (or target for) the objectifying gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing.

Alexander Pope was the greatest poet of his age and the dominant influence on eighteenth-century British poetry. His large oeuvre, written over a thirty-year period, encompasses satires, odes and political verse and reflects the sexual, moral and cultural issues of the world around him, often in brilliant lines and phrases which have become part of our language today. This is the first overview to analyse the full range of Pope's work and to set it in its historical and cultural context. Specially commissioned essays by leading scholars explore all of Pope's major works, including the sexual politics of The Rape of the Lock, the philosophical enquiries of An Essay on Man and the Moral Essays, and the mock-heroic of The Dunciad in its various forms. This volume will be indispensable not only for students and scholars of Pope's work, but also for all those interested in the Augustan age.

This study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive examinations ever devoted to a critical transformation in the material substance of the printed page; it carries out this exploration in the history of the book, moreover, by embedding these typographical changes in the context of other cultural phenomena in eighteenth-century Britain. The gradual abandonment of pervasive capitalization, italics, and caps and small caps in books printed in London, Dublin, and the American colonies between 1740 and 1780 is mapped in five-year increments which reveal that the appearance of the modern page in English began to emerge around 1765. This descriptive and analytical account focuses on poetry, classical texts, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, the novel, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, sermons and religious writings, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, government publications, and private correspondence; it also examines the reading public, canon formation, editorial theory and practice, and the role of typography in textual interpretation. These changes in printing conventions are then compared to other aspects of cultural change: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the publication of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755, the transformation of shop signs and the imposition of house numbers in London beginning in 1762, and the evolution of the English language and of English prose style. This study concludes that this fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive interest in refinement, regularity, and standardization in the second half of the century—and that it was therefore an important component in the self-conscious process of modernizing British culture.

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.

This text describes how 18th-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically.

Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment.