Exemplary England
Historical Inquiry and Literary Recompense in Pope, Gray, and Richardson
- 280 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Exemplary England
Historical Inquiry and Literary Recompense in Pope, Gray, and Richardson
About This Book
What meaning does the past hold for the present? History writing often prioritizes the ethos and actions of the "great men" of the past, those connected to formal expressions of power, as models worthy of imitation. The problem with such exemplars is that they craft a limited view of national identity, drawn from political, economic, religious, and social institutional superstructures. Inherently exclusionary, narratives of exemplary men inadequately represent the complexities of a metropolitan and diverse society.
In Exemplary England, Sarabeth Grant explores three canonical texts of 1740s England that critique the class, geography, and gender assumptions of the exemplar model. Through original readings of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Richardson, she locates practices of constituting history and registering national identity in eighteenth-century England beyond that tradition. Her book argues that these literary texts offer recompense for the national injustices endured by the disenfranchised, charting the development of inward historical consciousness as necessary to civic stability.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: âSuch Laborâd Nothings,â Rhetorical Showmen, and the Study of History
- 1 âAnother Phoebus, Thy Own Phoebusâ: Verse Satire and Class in The Dunciad
- 2 âTheir Artless Tale Relateâ: Pastoral Elegy and Geography in âElegy Written in a Country Churchyardâ
- 3 âShe Has Now a Tale to Tellâ: The Epistolary Novel and Gender in Clarissa
- Coda: âBuilding a Monument, or Burying the Deadâ
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index