Alexander Pope has long been acknowledged as one of the leading satirists of his age. Adopting the 18th-century belief that the “lash” of satire could lead to change, he applied that lash liberally in various works targeting those who established… Read More ›
The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot offers an autobiographical image of the platform from which the critique of society in Epistles to Several Persons is launched; but in his poetry of the 1730s Pope increasingly utilised the Roman satirist Horace as… Read More ›
Alexander Pope spent some time considering the choice of form for his late-career rebuttal of those who had most demeaned him in print. He selected a poetic letter, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734), which later critics would deem a rhetorical… Read More ›
An Essay on Criticism (1711) was Pope’s first independent work, published anonymously through an obscure bookseller [12–13]. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetime’s creative work or a prestigious commission but, riskily, on the skill and… Read More ›
Alexander Pope originally published Epistle to a Young Lady in 1712. His subject may have been imaginary or real, but in 1735 he changed the poem’s title to reference his dear friend, Martha Blount: Epistle to Miss Blount. They had… Read More ›
By the time Alexander Pope chose to publish his An Essay on Man (1734), he had received thorough and undeserved criticism from the poetasters, or “dunces,” whose activities he so often correctly lambasted, most notably in The Dunciad (1723). Still… Read More ›
As have other of works by Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712) has inspired many full-length books of critical consideration, so important was its effect upon Pope, his readership, the genre of poetry, and Pope’s legacy. The new… Read More ›
Literary criticism developed in the early eighteenth century as part of a broader cultural discourse that included moral philosophy, politics, aesthetics, science, and economics. For critics otherwise as different as Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), and Anthony Ashley Cooper,… Read More ›
The novel immediately following the publication of the epic work Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), The Holy Sinner led Mann and his readers through an entirely different literary experience. Published four years before the author’s death, The Holy Sinner… Read More ›
The French novel Cosmopolis, written in 1893 and translated into English the same year, is indicative of the earlier fiction of Paul Bourget (1852–1935), telling the story of a complicated love triangle set against the backdrop of Rome as the… Read More ›
The post–World War II novel Absent without Leave represents something of a change of literary pace for Heinrich Böll (1917–85), at least in terms of its formal and stylistic strategies. Although some thematic concerns persist from his earlier work of… Read More ›
The Harp and the Shadow (1979) is the fifth novel by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–80). Carpentier, a master of the modern Latin American novel, is credited with coining the term magic realism. As implied by its title, the novel… Read More ›
José Saramago (1922–2010 ), one of Portugal’s most famous writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. His novel Blindness is considered one of his most outstanding literary achievements. A speculative parable reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Plague,… Read More ›
In the second half of the eighteenth century, literary criticism turned away from the predominantly neoclassical thought of a previous generation, shifting from a vision of literature as a standard of civilized taste to one based on individual experience. Social… Read More ›
Don Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem. Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron… Read More ›
The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their… Read More ›
When Medea, commonly regarded as Euripides’ masterpiece, was first per-formed at Athens’s Great Dionysia, Euripides was awarded the third (and last) prize, behind Sophocles and Euphorion. It is not difficult to understand why. Euripides violates its audience’s most cherished gender… Read More ›
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (born March 24, 1919) poetry may be looked on as a kind of travelog in which he has subjectively recorded choice experiences or montages from experience, often in a jazzlike or free-associative manner. For Ferlinghetti, “reality” itself becomes… Read More ›
Dante’s crowning achievement, one of the most important works in Western literature and undisputedly the most important poetic text of the European Middle Ages, is the great poem he calls his Comedy, or Commedia (ca. 1307–1321). This seems an odd… Read More ›
Until the last few decades, attention to Ben Jonson’s (1572-1637) poetry focused largely on the famous songs and the moving epitaphs on children. Such choices were not ill-advised, but they are unrepresentative. The works in these modes certainly rank among… Read More ›
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