Publisher's Synopsis
This collection of essays brings together exciting work from a new generation of British scholars and critics, and tests such a view by placing Pope's poetry in a series of revealing contextsóintellectual, religious, political, and gender-basedówhich provoke new interpretations of his work. The authors debate Pope's "Toryism" and "Jabonism," his "feminized" or sexually ambivalent discourse, his relationship to strategies of politeness and decorum, discordia concors, epic manliness, models of body/spirit and voice/spectacle, and offers to read him and his work in the company of the romantic writers and later women novelists. Contents: Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; J. A. Downie 1688: Pope and the Rhetoric of Jacobitism; Christine Gerrard Pope and the Patriots; Thomas Woodman "Wanting Nothing but the Laurel": Pope and the Idea of the Laureate Poet; Carolyn D. Williams Breaking Decorums: Belinda, Bays, and Epic Effeminacy; Steve Clark "Let Blood and Body bear the Fault": Pope and Misogyny; Susan Matthews "Matter too soft": Pope and the Women's Novel; Stephen Bygrave Missing Parts: Voice and Spectacle in^R Eloisa to Abelard; Rebecca Ferguson "Intestine Wars": Body and Text in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and The Dunciad; John Whale Romantic Attacks: Pope and the Spirit of Language; David Fairer Pope, Blake, Heraclitus, and Oppositional Thinking; Nicholas Roe Pope, Politics, and Wordsworth's Prelude; Stephen Copley and David Fairer An Essay on Man and the Polite Reader; Brean S. Hammond "Guard the Sure Barrier": Pope and the Partitioning of Culture; Notes on Contributors^R.
