Wordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 1995 M12 14 - 190 pages
Recent studies of the concepts and ideologies of Romanticism have neglected to explore the ways in which Romanticism defined itself by reconfiguring its literary past. In Wordsworth's Pope Robert J. Griffin shows that many of the basic tenets of Romanticism derive from mid-eighteenth-century writers' attempts to free themselves from the literary dominance of Alexander Pope. As a result, a narrative of literary history in which Pope figured as an alien poet of reason and imitation became the basis for nineteenth-century literary history, and still affects our thinking on Pope and Romanticism. Griffin traces the genesis and transmission of "romantic literary history", from the Wartons to M. H. Abrams; in so doing, he calls into question some of our most basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.
 

Contents

The eighteenthcentury construction of Romanticism
24
Refinement Romanticism Francis Jeffrey
64
Wordsworths Pope
88
Mirror and lamp III
111
Conclusion with thoughts on method in literary historiography
133
Notes
146
Bibliography
170
Index
184
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information