Pope's letters reveal the life, colour, personalities, and ideas of his time. They show his poetry in the making, and they also show Pope in the process of fashioning his own life. This selection features especially some of the letters that he revised and re-directed before publishing them himself. It also includes many recently discovered letters, here collected for the first time, which throw new light on his character, relationships, and taste. The first selection of Pope's correspondence for nearly fifty years, this volume also provides an introduction, detailed commentary, and biographical index.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of 'authority', the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's poetic resonances, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. In a series of detailed readings leading scholars focus on the presentation of work by Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Newman, Yeats, Lawrence and David Jones. The wide chronological range enables unusually extensive comparison across the boundaries of generic form, and between the varying emotional, aesthetic and rhetorical emphases of specific periods: from the creation of fictitious personae to the construction of autobiographical 'self', from the interaction of printed word and visual image to the arrangements and rearrangements of structure and sequence.

Poetry of Opposition and Revolution is an important new study of the relation between poetry and politics in English literature from Dryden to Wordsworth. Building on his argument in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (also available from OUP), Howard Erskine-Hill reveals that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory and overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference. Drawing on the revisionist trend in recent historiography, the book offers new and thought-provoking readings of familiar texts. Dryden's Aeneid version and Pope's Rape of The Lock are shown to belong not just to contemporary convention, but to a more widespread and older style of envisioning high politics and the crises of government. The early books of The Prelude can be seen to show marked political features; reflections of the 1688 Revolution are traced in The Rape of the Lock; and a Jacobite emotion is identified in The Vanity of Human Wishes. Taking issue with recent New Historicist Romantic criticism, the concluding chapters argue that what have seemed to many to be traces of covert political displacement or erasure in Wordsworth are in fact marks of a continuing political preoccupation, which found new forms after the collapse of the Enlightenment programme into the Jacobin terror.

Court studies and Jacobitism have both received considerable attention from historians in recent years, yet so far no attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive examination of the Jacobite court in exile after the revolution of 1688-9. This book takes a completely fresh look at the Stuart court in France during the years when the Jacobite movement posed its greatest threat to the post-revolution governments in London. The Stuart court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is revealed as not only large and well financed, but also magnificently located in a spectacular royal palace vacated only recently by Louis XIV and in very close contact with the French court at Versailles - yet maintaining the traditions, organisation and ceremonial of the English court at Whitehall. The book also shows how the Stuart court in France came to an end, and explains why and how it has since been so badly misrepresented.

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of 'authority', the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's poetic resonances, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. In a series of detailed readings leading scholars focus on the presentation of work by Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Lawrence and David Jones. The wide chronological range enables unusually extensive comparison across the boundaries of generic form, and between the varying emotional, aesthetic and rhetorical emphases of specific periods: from the creation of fictitious 'persona' to the construction of autobiographical 'self', from the interaction of printed word and visual image to the arrangements and rearrangements of structure and sequence.

This new critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels provides a fresh and impartial account of this world-famous satire. It presents Swift's work in its historical and literary context, and explores its allusions, its four-part structure, its narrative strategy and its prose style. A final chapter sketches the fictional aftermath of the Travels from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and there is a guide to further reading.

Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to selections from non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This volume is concerned with radical prose from the period 1642-60 and comprises political pamphlets covering the years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth. All the pamphlets are revolutionary in varying degrees: two by Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and The Readie and the Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth; one each by the three Leveller leaders, Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton; one by the Digger, Winstanley and one by the Republican, Harrington. There is a substantial introduction to the whole volume in which the editors offer a historical survey of the period, consider the intellectual and political context of the pamphlets, sketch in significant biographical details and examine the various styles which the writers employ. This book will prove to be an indispensable tool for all serious students of seventeenth-century literature, history and political theory.

This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politcs in sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature, focusing in particular on the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absalom and Architophel, and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference. Drawing on the revisionist trend in recent historiography, and taking issue with recent New Historicist criticism, the book offers new and thought-provoking readings of familiar texts. For example, Shakespeare's Histories, far from endorsing a conservative Tudor myth, are shown to examine and reject divine-right kingship in favour of a political vision of what the succession crisis of the 1590s required. A forgotten political aspect of Hamlet is restored and an anti-Cromwellian strain is identified in Milton's Paradise Lost. Again and again, Professor Erskine-Hill is able to show how some of the most powerful works of the period, works which in the past have been read for their aesthetic achievement and generalized wisdom, in fact contain a political component crucial to our understanding of the poem.