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

Today, we tend to react skeptically to claims about our access to the animal mind, the political importance of compassion, and the natural origins of community. However, such claims were widespread in the Restoration and eighteenth century, the long Age of Sensibility. Even so famous a skeptic as the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote that animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even reason. In "The Animal Claim," Tobias Menely shows that for Hume and other thinkers of his time, the acknowledgment of creaturely voice was crucial to their theories of community. Looking primarily to the long eighteenth century in Britain, Menely argues that sympathyincluding sympathy with animalscame to be regarded as a foundational resource of social relation, and that it fell to poets, in particular, to represent creaturely voice in the public sphere. Menely connects this development to new ideas of political community in Britain and the emergence of a viable discourse of animal rights in the age of legislative reform. The result is an original contribution to both animal studies and eighteenth-century scholarship."

This critical biography places Pope’s life and poetry in the context of the political state of Britain following the Revolution of 1688. It gives close readings of Pope’s major poems, including the less commonly discussed translations of Homer. Frequent resort is made to Pope’s letters, including new items. A final chapter discusses Pope’s literary reputation in the later eighteenth-century.

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.

This volume is the first to discuss the canon of Pope’s verse in relation to Early British Enlightenment thinking about mythology and mythography. Pope did not merely use classical (along with non-classical) mythology in his verse as a traditional, richly diverse medium through which to represent the diversity of private and civic life in his day, but he was an ambitious translator as well as refashioner of myth. It is a medium that he shapes anew and variously across all his major poems. This volume enhances appreciation of myth as a mode of apprehension as well as expression throughout Pope’s verse. In doing so it illuminates how, in early eighteenth-century Britain, understandings of what myth is and what it does were taking new directions – not least in response to Baconian thought and its legacy.

This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn’s landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope’s writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions, and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne’s rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.

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.