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.
