Histories of British Art 1660-1735 Reconstruction and Transformation

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HISTORIES OF BRITISH ART 1660-1735 RECONSTRUCTION AND TRANSFORMATION ABSTRACT: DAVID BREWER David A. Brewer (Ohio State University) ‘Authors and objecthood’ In this talk, I would like to explore a wide range of authorial likenesses in a variety of media (traditional portraits on canvas, painted wooden shop signs, engravings and woodcuts, carved and cast busts, etc.) in order to theorize the consequences in late Stuart and early Georgian Britain and her colonies of making, owning, and viewing an object which purported to resemble or stand in for an author. These decades are notorious, of course, for the ways in which authors were routinely linked to—and often reduced to— objects: e.g., the incipient toilet paper, or “reliques of the bum,” that Thomas Shadwell is destined to become in John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (written c. 1678). Such moves have been traditionally explained—and implicitly dismissed—as run-of-the-mill satiric dehumanizing, no different in principle than calling someone a “dog.” I would contend instead that there are important and seriously under-recognized ways in which the routine conception of authors as akin to objects was what enabled the Restoration and eighteenth-century literary world to function, and that the proliferation of artifacts purporting to be authorial likenesses was crucial in making such conceptions—and the practices they fostered—not only thinkable but attractive and compelling. However, different sorts of objects worked in different ways, and temporal and geographic distance introduced still further variation: what a reader in 1730s Massachusetts might do with a frontispiece of a contemporary, like Alexander Pope, is hardly interchangeable with what a 1710s collector in Covent Garden might do with a bust of Milton. Accordingly, I will be continually toggling back and forth between different scales of analysis in order to describe the complex, but ultimately coherent cluster of emotions, genres, objects, and practices that collectively comprised the socio-literary-artistic system inhabited by authorial heads. .

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And Voltaire's
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF POPE’S “ESSAY ON MAN” AND VOLTAIRE’S “DISCOURS EN VERS SUR L’HONME” A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF ATLANTA UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF ARTS BY ANNIE BERNICE WIMBUSH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ATLANTA, GEORGIA NAY 1966 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE . a a . • • • . iii. Chapter I. THENENANDTHEIRWORKS. a• • • • • . a aa 1 The Life of Alexander Pope The Life of Voltaire II. ABRIEFRESUNEOFTHETWOPOENS . aa • . • •. a a 20 Pope’s “Essay on Man” Voltaire’s “Discours En Vers Sur L’Hoimne” III. A COMPARISON OF THE TWO POEMS . a • • 30 B IBLIOGRAPHY a a a a a a a a a a a • a a a • a a a a a a a 45 ii PREFACE In the annals of posterity few men of letters are lauded with the universal renown and fame as are the two literary giants, Voltaire and Pope. Such creative impetus and “esprit” that was uniquely theirs in sures their place among the truly great. The histories and literatures of France and England show these twQ men as strongly influential on philosophical thinking. Their very characters and temperaments even helped to shape and transform man’s outlook on life in the eighteenth century and onward.. On the one hand, there is Voltaire, the French poet, philosopher, historian and publicist whose ideas became the ideas of hundreds of others and whose art remains with us today as monuments of a great mind. On the other there is Pope, the English satirical poet and philosopher, endowed with a hypersensitive soul, who concerned himself with the ordinary aspects of literary and social life, and these aspects he portrayed in his unique and excellent verse, Both men were deeply involved in the controversial issues of the time.
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Pope's Meadow Leaflet
Get involved Useful information Conservation Volunteering Directions If you’re interested in a practical, hands-on way Located between Bracknell and Binfield, the main of conserving parks and countryside sites such entrance is off St Marks Road, north of it’s junction as Pope’s Meadow, there are a host of voluntary with B3408 London Road. organisations with whom you can get involved with and help make a difference. Access on foot Discover ... More information can be found on our website. There are two pedestrian entrances located off St Marks Road, with two further entrances off Events Murrell Hill Lane. A wide range of events and activities take place at Pope’s Meadow The site is also on the local bus route, for more Pope’s Meadow throughout the year. These include information contact traveline. wildlife talks, countryside walks and educational events for schools, youth groups and children such Facilities as pond-dipping and bug hunting. Parking Toddlers More information on our website. Play area Access Surfaced Path Bike Picnic parking table Contacts Bracknell Forest Council Parks & Countryside Service Tel: 01344 354441 Pond dipping Email: [email protected] Website: www.bracknell-forest.gov.uk/ parksandcountryside Orienteering Orienteering is an exciting challenge for children and Travelline Tel: 0871 200 22 33 adults to find points in the landscape using only a Email: www.traveline.info map and a compass. It can be enjoyed either as a competitive sport or a leisurely walk around the site. A permanent course has been mapped out Copies of this leaflet may be obtained in Pope’s Meadow in association with Berkshire in large print, Braille, on audio tape or Volunteers and The Big Lottery Fund.
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1 Pope, Curll, and the Intermediality of Eighteenth-Century
Pope, Curll, and the Intermediality of Eighteenth-Century Character One wonders whether Alexander Pope did quite foresee the avalanche of print he would set off when he was planning the publication of his familiar letters. He must have known that Edmund Curll and other booksellers would quickly move to reprint if they could at all get away with it, but the sheer scale of operations – and the reader demand that such a scale implied – may have surprised even him.1 The publication of his letters came at an already busy time for Pope, who, in 1733-7 alone, published 24 new titles as well as a vast number of further editions and reprints of these and older titles. The letters, however, drove the publication of Pope‟s texts and of Popeiana to a level of frenzy that had only been reached once before, in the aftermath of the publication of the Dunciad (1728). By the time the dust was settling, Pope had stage-managed three different versions of his correspondence in at least 17 editions between 1735 and 1742, while notorious London book seller Edmund Curll had produced at least a further 11 editions and had added engravings of Pope and his correspondents to all of his volumes. It is therefore probably safe to say that the publication of Letters of Mr. Pope and Several Eminent Persons on 19 May 1735 marked the beginning of a media event that would attract the attention of British readers, writers, and booksellers for the next seven years.2 Though the focus of many excellent studies, the broad outlines of what I call the “Letters media event” bear summarizing again if for no other reason than that its timeline and cast are extremely convoluted.
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Pope and Slavery
Proceedings of the British Academy, 91,27753 Pope and Slavery HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL I am certainly desirous to run from my Country, if you’ll run from yours, and study Popery and Slavery abroad a while, to reconcile ourselves to the Church & State we may find at home on our return. (Pope to the Earl of Marchmont, 22 June 1740 Correspondence, IV. 250) 1 IN 1790 THE POET Alexander Radishchev, called ‘The First Russian Radical’, printed his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, criticising the condition of the serfs under Catherine the Great, and dedicating it without permission to his friend, the poet A. M. Kutuzov. Kutuzov, alarmed with reason at this dedication, recounts how on an earlier occasion he had remonstrated with Radishchev, quoting to him in English Pope’s translation of Homer’s lfiad,Bk. I, the lines of Calchas to Achilles on the perils of telling unwelcome truths to kings: For I must speak what Wisdom would conceal, And Truths invidious [to] the Great reveal. Bold is the task! when Subjects grown too wise Instruct a Monarch where his Error lies; For tho’ we deem the short-liv’d fury past Be sure, the Mighty will revenge at last. (I. 101-6)’ 0 The British Academy 1998. ‘In my reference to Radishchev I am indebted to Professor Monica Partridge and to Professor A. G. Cross. The lines quoted from Pope’s Iliad translation by A. M. Kutuzov are I. 101-6; T. E. VIII. 92. The allusion is briefly discussed in David Marshal Lang, The First Russian Radical 1749-1802 (London, 1959), pp.
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Introduction
INTRODUCTION n four verse epistles of modest length published anonymously between February 1733 and January 1734, Alexander Pope revealed Iyet another aspect of his vast poetic ambition. Having already pub- lished a substantial collected poems in 1717, translated Homer, ed- ited Shakespeare, and trumpeted the corruption of contemporary literary and public culture in his Dunciad, Pope writes a philosophi- cal poem. He begins his poem with (nearly) the same avowed pur- pose as Milton in Paradise Lost, already in Pope’s time the great Brit- ish religious and national epic: to vindicate (Milton says justify) the ways of God to man. But Pope does not use biblical history—the elevation of the son, the fall of angels, the creation of the world, the fall of the first people—to shape his vindication. Instead he produces a description of man in the abstract in four epistles that he says are a map to the more practically oriented and historically specific poems he was planning, poems on subjects such as the use of riches and taste. Forgoing narrative is one challenge Pope sets himself; another is the ambition of the Essay on Man to synthesize the great diversity of thinking in the allied disciplines with something to say about where humans find themselves in the universe (anthropology, cos- mology, metaphysics, moral psychology, physics, theology—just to begin a list). Pope formulates concise statements on central ethical topics, moderating between antagonistic schools of thought. Fur- ther, he writes a poem that passes for orthodoxy, even piety, in the terms of eighteenth- century British state religion, while not speci- fying the Christian revelation in the poem.
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Life and Works of Alexander Pope Dr Atal Kumar Department of English
Life and Works of Alexander Pope Dr Atal Kumar Department of English Gaya College, Gaya Alexander Pope, the greatest poet and verse satirist of the Augustan Period, was born to Alexander Pope and Edith Turner on May 21, 1688, in London where his Roman Catholic father was a prosperous linen merchant. He had a Catholic upbringing. Ironically, young Pope was born at a time when rights of the Catholics to teaching, education, voting and holding public office was banned due to the enactment to the Test Acts which uplifted the status of the Church of England. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 his family moved out of London and settled about 1700 at Binfield in Windsor Forest. He had little formal schooling, largely educating himself through extensive reading. Additionally, he equipped himself with studying various languages. It was with the know-how of the language that he read works of various poets as such English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Sir William Trumbull, a retired statesman of literary interests who lived nearby, did much to encourage the young poet. So did the dramatist and poet William Wycherley and the poet-critic William Walsh, with whom Pope became acquainted when he was about 17 and whose advice to aim at "correctness" contributed to the flawless texture and concentrated brilliance of Pope's verse. A sweet-tempered child with a fresh, plump face, Pope contracted a tubercular infection in his later childhood and never grew taller than 4 feet 6 inches. He suffered curvature of the spine and constant headaches. His features, however, were striking, and the young Joshua Reynolds noticed in his "sharp, keen countenance … something grand, like Cicero's." His physical appearance, frequently ridiculed by his enemies, undoubtedly gave an edge to Pope's satire; but he was always warmhearted and generous in his affection for his many friends.
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Alexander Pope‘S Biography
Alexander Pope‘s Biography • 1688-1744 (Painting of Pope, c. 1727) Chronology • 1700 (age 12): living with retired father on small estate in Windsor Forest. Much reading and writing (perhaps especially because of health difficulties—bone disease left him short in physical stature). • 1706-11 (18-23 yrs old): a man of literary society at London coffeehouses and taverns. Friends (sort of) with Whig literary figures: Congreve, Steele, Addison, etc. Chronology Continued • 1711 (age 23): wrote Essay on Criticism • 1712/14 (age 24/26): Rape of the Lock • 1712 (age 24): befriends Jonathan Swift • 1713 (age 25): begins translation of Homer‘s Iliad. (later translates Odyssey) Note on Religious Context • Pope is famous for earning his living as a writer: ―Because he could not, as a Roman Catholic, attend university, vote, or hold public office, he was excluded from the sort of patronage that was bestowed by statesmen on many writers during the reign of [Queen] Anne‖ (NA 2665). • Pope‘s bookishness as a youth and his gifts as a writer eventually paid off for him. Pope‘s Twickenham Estate • 1718 (age 30): Five-acre villa with grotto Chronology Continued • 1728: Begins epic satire The Dunciad. • Pope was not shy about mocking others. – “A little learning is a dangerous thing”: – this famous quote from his Essay on Criticism exemplifies his attitude in The Dunciad. – “fools rush in, where angels fear to tread” is another quote of his with a similar point. • He was more of a ―cultured‖ elitist than an egalitarian… Literary, Social, & Economic Context • Pope ―disliked and feared . tendencies of his time—the vulgarization of taste and the arts consequent on the rapid growth of the reading public and the development of journalism, magazines, and other popular and cheap publications, which spread scandal, sensationalism, and political partisanship—in short the new commercial spirit of the nation that was corrupting not only the arts but, as Pope saw it, the national life itself‖ (NA 2666).
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Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest
Windsor-Forest TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE GEORGE LORD LANSDOWN Non injussa cano: Te nostræ, Vare, Myricæ Te Nemus omne canet; nec Phoebo gratior ulla est Quam sibi quæ Vari præscripsit pagina nomen. VIRGIL 1 Thy forests, Windsor! and thy green retreats, Based on text in The Works of Alexander Pope (1736). Pope’s own notes are enclosed in quotation marks and have his name appended to them in square brackets. Other notes are supplied (or adapted) from various modern editions and studies, with attributions as follows, but without surrounding quotation marks: Brown = Laura Brown. Alexander Pope. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Butt = The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. Fairer & Gerrard = Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Price = The Selected Poetry of Pope. Ed. Martin Price. New York: New American Library, 1970. Rogers = The Oxford Authors: Alexander Pope. Ed. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Rogers 2004 = Pat Rogers. The Symbolic Design of “Windsor-Forest”. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. Sherman = The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Gen. ed. David Damrosch. Vol. 1C: The Restoration and the 18th Century. Ed. Stuart Sherman. 2nd edn. New York: Longman, 2003. Williams = Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Headnote “This Poem was written at two different times: the first part of it which relates to the country, in the year 1704, at the same time with the Pastorals: the latter part was not added till the year 1713, in which it was publish'd” [Pope].
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Echoes of Leibniz in Pope's Essay On
Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee Volume 8 Issue 1 Article 3 January 2017 Echoes of Leibniz in Pope’s Essay on Man: Criticism and Cultural Shift in the Eighteenth Century Sierra Billingslea [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Other Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Billingslea, Sierra (2017) "Echoes of Leibniz in Pope’s Essay on Man: Criticism and Cultural Shift in the Eighteenth Century," Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit/vol8/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Volunteer, Open Access, Library Journals (VOL Journals), published in partnership with The University of Tennessee (UT) University Libraries. This article has been accepted for inclusion in Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee by an authorized editor. For more information, please visit https://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit. Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee Volume 8, Issue 1 (2017) PURSUIT Echoes of Leibniz in Pope’s Essay on Man: Criticism and Cultural Shift in the Eighteenth Century SIERRA BILLINGSLEA Towson University, Towson, MD [email protected] Advisor: Dr. George Hahn This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest poet of the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest of all the poets who have written in the English language. Poets and critics since Pope’s own day have recognized just how spectacularly talented he was as a crafter of verse, and how ambitious he was, how fully he willed himself into becoming a great poet. From his early twenties, when poems like An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock established him as the most vibrant and interesting young poet in London, Pope has been considered to be a great writer and the most representative poet of the entire literary period between the works of John Milton and the emergence of the movement called Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century. But what, exactly, does it mean to say that Pope was great and significant? What is “greatness,” anyway? This is not an easy question to answer–what is “great” in one era or context may seem trite in another, and it’s fair to say that the kind of poetry that Pope, with its tightly-controlled heroic couplets, has not been in fashion with readers or critics for a couple of hundred years. And because of that fact, Pope and the poetry of this entire period is less accessible to us than it ought to be; modern readers read less poetry than did eighteenth-century readers and, even those who read poetry are simply not used to verse like this. The end result is that it is hard for us to see what contemporaries recognized in Pope, what they found so striking, and what caused them to admire his works.
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English Literature Before 1800 John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky
The Kentucky Review Volume 4 Number 1 This issue is devoted to a catalog of an Article 10 exhibition from the W. Hugh Peal Collection in the University of Kentucky Libraries. 1982 Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: English Literature before 1800 John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Gatton, John Spalding (1982) "Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: English Literature before 1800," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol4/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. English Literature before 1800 te td of :1t of 98. JOHN FLETCHER. Monsieur Thomas: A Comedy. London: Thomas Harper, 1639. Although regularly coupled with Francis Beaumont, his collaborator for some five years on a number of dramas, John Fletcher (1579-1625) also worked with such playwrights as Massinger, Rowley, and Shakespeare, with whom he is said to have shared in the composition of Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. Fletcher also enjoyed a career as sole author of no fewer than fifteen dramas, many of them performed at the Blackfriars private theatre.
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1 Pope, Curll, and the Intermediality of Eighteenth-Century
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Ghent University Academic Bibliography Pope, Curll, and the Intermediality of Eighteenth-Century Character One wonders whether Alexander Pope did quite foresee the avalanche of print he would set off when he was planning the publication of his familiar letters. He must have known that Edmund Curll and other booksellers would quickly move to reprint if they could at all get away with it, but the sheer scale of operations – and the reader demand that such a scale implied – may have surprised even him.1 The publication of his letters came at an already busy time for Pope, who, in 1733-7 alone, published 24 new titles as well as a vast number of further editions and reprints of these and older titles. The letters, however, drove the publication of Pope‟s texts and of Popeiana to a level of frenzy that had only been reached once before, in the aftermath of the publication of the Dunciad (1728). By the time the dust was settling, Pope had stage-managed three different versions of his correspondence in at least 17 editions between 1735 and 1742, while notorious London book seller Edmund Curll had produced at least a further 11 editions and had added engravings of Pope and his correspondents to all of his volumes. It is therefore probably safe to say that the publication of Letters of Mr. Pope and Several Eminent Persons on 19 May 1735 marked the beginning of a media event that would attract the attention of British readers, writers, and booksellers for the next seven years.2 Though the focus of many excellent studies, the broad outlines of what I call the “Letters media event” bear summarizing again if for no other reason than that its timeline and cast are extremely convoluted.
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