The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson

by Blanford Parker

Overview

The Triumph of Augustan Poetics offers an important and original reevaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Starting with Butler's outrageous burlesque, Hudibras, Blanford Parker describes the origins of Augustan satire and its momentous departure from the religious and social writing of an earlier era. He goes on to explain the creation, from the ruins of satire, of a new poetry of nature and everyday life (emerging most significantly in the work of Pope and Thomson), and the ambiguous or hostile responses of writers including Samuel Johnson.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521028677
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought , #36
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Samuel Butler and the end of analogy; 2. Transitional Augustan poetry; 3. Pope and mature Augustanism; 4. Thomson and the invention of the literal; 5. The four poles of the Christian imagination in relation to Augustanism; 6. The fideist reaction; 7. Johnson and fideism; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...Parker...offers a new understanding of the relationship between the Augustan mode and the modes of preceding ages." Choice

"Despite this study's massive theological, historical, nd poetic frame of reference, the book is clearly written and can thus be recommended to common reader and scholar alike." SJSSC Newsletter

From the Publisher