Claude Willan

(Author)

Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century GenealogyHardcover, 7 March 2023

Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy
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Print Length
328 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Date Published
7 Mar 2023
ISBN-10
1503630862
ISBN-13
9781503630864

Description

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.

Product Details

Author:
Claude Willan
Book Format:
Hardcover
Country of Origin:
US
Date Published:
7 March 2023
Dimensions:
15.75 x 23.11 x 2.54 cm
Genre:
British
ISBN-10:
1503630862
ISBN-13:
9781503630864
Language:
English
Pages:
328
Weight:
589.67 gm

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