Howard Erskine-Hill

Professor of Literary History Faculty of English Howard Erskine-Hill

This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politics from the 1688 Revolution to the early years of the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the works of Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth. Building on his argument in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (also available from OUP), Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of political allegory and overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference.

Dryden to Wordsworth

Poetry of Opposition and Revolution

Richard A. McCabe

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Composition, Publication, Reception

Presenting Poetry

Karen O'Brien

Leonard Sugarman Professor of English John J Richetti

Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America; and it investigates the nature and degree of their intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation. Karen O'Brien combines the methodologies of literary criticism and intellectual history to explore debates about Enlightenments and the political uses of narrative. Where previous studies have emphasised the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, she reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

Narratives of Enlightenment

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.

Professor of Literary History Faculty of English Howard Erskine-Hill

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