Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Literary Authority : An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy, Hardback Book

Literary Authority : An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

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.

Information

Save 3%

£72.00

£69.45

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information