LITERARY AUTHORITY : an eighteenth-century genealogy

Richard Owen Cambridge's print Dr. Johnson's Ghost shows the Doctor surprising Boswell at work on a tapestry of materials, piecing togetherThe Life of Johnson. The Ghost addresses Boswell with a quotation from Congreve's Way of the World: "Thou are a Retailer of Phrases, / And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, / Like a Maker of Pincushions." In its happiest instances, literary scholarship may aspire to the condition of a pincushion, and I have had the opportunity to count myself among those makers during the writing of this book. So many people have been so generous with their insights that my task has seemed much closer to the faithful assembly of found fragments than the manufacture of something out of whole cloth. If the reader feels that this pincushion is poorly stuffed, or the stitching awry, the fault lies only with the maker, not with the materials I have been gifted by mentors, teachers, colleagues, friends, and students. Likewise, whether the reader ultimately finds this study an ignominious victory or a glorious defeat, the responsibility is mine alone. This book's first life was more than ably directed by John Bender and Blair Hoxby, both of whom gave copiously of their time and advocacy, marrying scholarship, encouragement, and circumspection with judicious splashes of ice water. Denise Gigante's attentive work as a reader had an instrumental effect on the argument at many points. That work could not have been completed without a Stanford Modern British Histories and Cultures grant, an ASECS / Walter Jackson Bate fellowship to "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"-- Provided by publisher "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, he asks, and what could we use it for?" -- Page 4 of cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Whig Prose Cultures 2. “I love with all my heart” 3. Dipt in Ink 4. Pope’s Moderate Ascendancy 5. Samuel Johnson’s Struggle with Pope Coda Coda Notes Bibliography Index