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Focusing on writings by Samuel Butler (Hudibras), John Dryden (Absalom and Achitophel), and Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub), this chapter examines satire in verse and prose attacking a variety of forms of dissent. Such Anglican satiric writings regularly associated dissenting politics and devotion with hypocrisy in many forms. Dissent is represented as politically manipulative, ethically flexible, and interpretatively deceptive or erroneous, appropriating biblical texts to dissenting agendas. In a period where ironic, or rhetorical, or parabolic writing against religions of any stripe was typically considered suspicious or transgressive, however, the ironic methods used by these Anglican satirists, and most especially by Swift, involved serious difficulties of reception, and of interpretation.

This chapter looks at Jonathan Swift’s political satire, focusing on a crucial, seldom-discussed and newly relevant theme: his deep hostility towards specialists and experts. It argues that Swift and his allies understood expertise in terms of a broader anti-technical idea of statesmanship, one that also advocated ‘common sense’ as a positive model for political deliberation, and ‘wit’ as a model for discourse. Satire was a common medium for articulating this programme, often in terms that were themselves doubled and ironized. Swift and many of his associates deplored secrecy and innuendo in political life and, at the same time, appropriated them as modes for oppositional satire. They painted modern instrumental thinking and modern technocratic politics as dull and clumsy, while adopting the discourses of those experts parodically as ‘mock-arts’. It was the interrelations between this group of satirical themes and political topoi that gave them power and significance at the start of the eighteenth century.

Alexander Pope’s moralizing satires belong to the Augustan style of free translation. But in one crucial respect, Pope acted more like the Latin continental commentators through whom many English readers approached Horace. He studied Horace for concealed philosophical meanings; he often detected danger, especially in Horace’s Epicurean philosophy of pleasure; and through contradiction, misdirection, or silence, Pope guided readers towards a more suitable moral or a seemingly innocuous understanding of what Horace said. This intellectual and supremely ambitious Pope is not the genteel, easily confused poet we know from the scholarship of the middle twentieth century. He does resemble the driven and often duplicitous Pope described by Victorian scholars. Meanwhile, earlier English translators for more than a century had been keenly alive to Horace’s philosophy of pleasure. Pope’s innovation was to intervene even more fully and decisively than earlier humanists or translators as he masked, reversed, or banalized Horace’s ideas.

Beginning with an examination of some of the ways in which allusion was conceptualized in the eighteenth century, this chapter focuses on verbal literary allusion, which exists on the allusive spectrum between frank plagiarism at the one extreme and echo at the other. Close reading of poems by Alexander Pope (the different versions of the Dunciad), William Collins (“Ode on the Poetical Character”), and Thomas Gray (“Ode on the Spring” and “The Progress of Poesy”) demonstrates some ways in which eighteenth-century poets used the figure of allusion to articulate meaning, and to negotiate the writer’s relation with poetic contemporaries and forebears. Allusion tests the reader’s powers of recognition and invites the reader’s participation; this chapter explores some opportunities for poetic obfuscation or clarification that the trope offered to both satiric and lyric authors, and some possibilities and implications of the poet’s, or editor’s, or poet-editor’s explanatory and interpretative commentary.

This article discusses the American constitutional elegy. It argues that American national difference in literature can be tracked in the terms of its engagement with specifically American constitutional principles, concentrating on the national period, beginning in the late eighteenth century with the Revolutionary War and sketching the story up to the present day. It then returns to the great theme of elegy as a flexible form and its practices under persistent self-scrutiny. All choral poetry carries with it an association with the choruses of ancient, especially Athenian, tragedy and thus with the common understanding that the chorus speaks as or on behalf of a democratic citizenry. Marilyn Hacker has written a ‘constitutional elegy’ in the great American tradition, a tradition that continues to challenge our principled commitment to the legal and symbolic bonds of ‘adjacent difference’ in a rights-based national polity.

This article addresses the female-authored elegy. By far the greatest number of elegies penned by women between 1660 and 1834 confront the loss of a dearly beloved family member or friend. Additionally, it describes Mary Chudleigh's three elegies at length because they provide a brilliant representation of the emotional continuum upon which other female elegists map the work of grieving. At the end of the eighteenth century, the female-authored elegy underwent a significant literary development. In the hands of its most skilled practitioners — Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon, and Felicia Hemans — the poetic elegy became an exploration. The female-authored elegies functioned on occasion as a vehicle of culturally repressed sexual desire. Many of them are more specific in their political critique, taking the occasion to support particular parties, policies or public figures.

Charles Brockden Brown, who edited three periodicals between 1799 and 1809, used his experience as a novelist to engage readers on important cultural issues. His periodicals became increasingly political. Brown’s “Annals of Europe and America” document historical events, his capacity as a novelist to write “history,” and his status as an ironic historian. In assessing Napoleonic rule and British expansion, he develops a self-conscious method that also informs his inquiry into American events. He sympathetically renders oppressed others in India, comments ironically on motives for exploiting the American west, and interrogates political intrigue in the 1808 Republican nomination process. With developing awareness of the constructed, contingent nature of history, Brown came to understand political self-interest, power and imperialism, and American exceptionalism relative to that of Europe. As in his novels, he imaginatively and provocatively employed genre conventions of the day to represent the past and critically reflect on the present.

This essay investigates the conservative, loyalist fiction published in Britain during the French Revolution and its aftermath. A substantial number and a wide variety of these novels were published: long and short, propagandistic and philosophical, for adults and children and by obscure and well-known authors. The essay identifies and analyses the principal structures and themes of anti-Jacobin fiction, and closely examines a representative sample. It assesses their contribution to the ‘war of ideas’ and considers how they fit into larger histories of the novel.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) and Chilean artist Demian Schopf’s photographic exhibits embody the Baroque’s notorious contradictory nature: the baroque is at once joyful and sad. One wing of baroque expression, with historical roots in the Catholic religious baroque, is closely associated with the melancholic contemplation of ruin, death, and catastrophe. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the Deleuzian principle of becoming-minor, the program of the rebellious consumption of tradition and of re-creating existing forms. In The Road, McCarthy memorializes post-apocalyptic ruin in a grand baroque style reminiscent of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Conversely, Schopf’s portraits of harquebus-brandishing angels and Andean dancers in colorful costumes embodying Christian and pagan figures recover the Andean mestizo baroque, one of the major expressions of the transculturating New World baroque. McCarty’s post-apocalyptic baroque meditates on death, extinction and finitude; Schopf’s joyful baroque celebrates the creativity of culture and its evolution toward greater diversity.

Augustan American verse is the essence of this article. The poetry composed by the colonial poets from New England are discussed in this article. Colonial poets often said they were imitating Alexander Pope, Virgil, and Horace. Joseph Addison, John Dryden, and John Milton were also frequently mentioned. A reader acquainted with James Thomson, Abraham Cowley, Samuel Butler, and John Pomfret's “The Choice” will find much familiar in colonial poetry—so much so that later critics have often complained that colonial verse is derivative. Like their European contemporaries, Augustan poets in the colonies believed the “polish'd Arts” could help control “wild Passions” and “humanize the Soul.” This article also traces the transcendent values and contractarian logic which constitutes the Augustan Age. Detailed analysis of the works of writers such as Henry Brookes The New Metamorphoses and works of Ebenezer Cook forms the concluding part of the article.

This chapter examines the influence and persistence of the Augustan tradition upon Romanticism. The role of Horace as an occasionally rather vexed model for both movements is used as a lens to view their complex interrelations. It begins with an account of the role of Horatian satire in framing the Romantic critique of imperialism, before moving on to discuss the Romantic pastoral tradition and its debt to Augustanism. The essay ends with an account of the satirical tradition in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the writers in the Shelley circle and finding, in the later work of Lord Byron, the quintessential Romantic Augustan.

Walter Scott’s historical novel achieved unprecedented success, and almost single-handedly propelled the novel as a genre into the literary field. A potent synthesis of history, romance, theory, and antiquarianism, the Waverley Novels rewrote contemporary modes of historical and national romance through a thematic of the heterogeneity of historical time. They answered to a new historical sensibility in a post-Revolutionary era of expanding readership; helped to forge a new British national identity; and were instrumental in reconfiguring literary culture for their time.

This chapter defines literary qualities of ballads, those sung narratives which are part of our anonymous literary heritage. The conventions of the genre are discussed, such as the imagery of ballads as well as their narrative structure, characters, diction, prosody, rhyme schemes, and modal melodies. Qualities associated with songs or stories transmitted orally, such as incremental repetition and formulaic epithets or descriptive commonplaces, are also discussed and examples are given. Some of the controversies about the origins and composition of ballads are sketched in, as well as a thumbnail history of when and how these popular narratives were first collected. Their prevalence in eighteenth-century British society is suggested. The subject matter of ballads is described and the plots of a number of typical ballads are given in brief.

The Nonsense Club was a confederacy of writers who gathered around the polemical satirist Charles Churchill and his friend Robert Lloyd during the 1760s. Churchill was celebrated as an opposition polemicist, but other members of the Club—including Lloyd, George Colman, Bonnell Thornton, and William Cowper—adopt a less direct, often self-conscious satiric mode, marked by a nonchalant awareness of their work’s ultimate lack of effect. This results in an odd mix of outspoken critique, bracing satiric barbs, almost affectionate parody, and incidental, and ad hoc considerations of the purpose of writing itself. The present account offers a survey of the Club’s poetic satire: its attitude towards contemporary poetry, most notable in satires and burlesques; the small but clear originality in the work of Lloyd; and the satire of Churchill, the most immediately consequential poet to emerge from the group.

The city was a primary theater of Baroque rhetorical projection. At once political, anagogical, and aesthetic, from its built form to the ephemeral structures and processions that animated it, the Baroque city was shaped into a theatrical space. The city was also a microcosm, a world in miniature. Political means were directed toward the representation of civic harmony, the concordance of the civic and the celestial, and the mirror of Justice; beauty was not only an aesthetic experience, it was a sign of a harmonious society. This chapter focuses on several cities that are representative of some critical aspects of Baroque urbanism. Beginning in Rome, where many of the techniques of Baroque urban design were generated, it tracks their propagation to Paris and across France, to Germany, and finally to Amsterdam. The picture that emerges depicts those characteristics of the Baroque city that made it both unique and influential.

Between the the late sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century, European diplomacy undergoes a dramatic expansion. New forms of representation and negotiation—summed up in Richelieu’s call for a “constant negotiation, ceaselessly and everywhere”—result in an increasingly complicated diplomatic world. These changes in practice are discussed in theories of diplomacy, but their implications may be most clearly seen in imaginary—that is, literary—depictions of diplomacy. The chapter studies a number of moments of diplomatic confusion, in plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, and Rotrou. It shows that these plays depict the changing political and moral role of the ambassador, the relationship between diplomacy and other forms of power, and the importance of new forms of communication. The essay also explores the largely neglected role of diplomacy in modern theories of the Baroque.

This entry describes how discourse in the Baroque period variously functioned as a sophisticated, often subtle, and sometimes exorbitant means of mediating between words and things, between emergent, conflicted selves, and a world perceived as illusory. Such discourse tended to prize ingenuity, learning, difficulty, and novelty. Comprising many nonfictional prose genres, from the essay to the aphorism, Baroque discourse saw the cultivation of pointed, conceited, paratactic, and digressive prose styles. Vehicles for retrospective and prospective, deductive, and inductive modes of thought, such styles drew on the classical and humanist legacy even as they helped writers express novel cultural, political, epistemological, and metaphysical concerns. Such heterogeneity aside, exemplary writers such as Burton, Browne, Marino, Balzac, Pascal, Kircher, Leibniz, Quevedo, Gracián, Sor Juana, and Sigüenza y Góngora, all cultivated versions of a prosaic “I,” a self that tried to negotiate coincidentia oppositorum and mediate information overload.

The fundamental assumption of commentators from the early modern period is that tasteful music functions simultaneously to express sentiment and to move listener-spectators. The three core elements of the baroque operatic spectacle—poetry, music, and dance—are defined by their ability to express and convey passion. Commentators point to the particular ability of musical language—and its combination with poetry and movement—to represent that which is out of reach of spoken language, or below the threshold of linguistic representation. Although both dramma per musica and the tragédie en musique arose and were fundamentally grounded in monarchical cultural worlds, both also endured successfully as public art forms. Aesthetically, baroque opera exhibits and revels in nested structures, manifested in plays within plays and in references that place the operatic moment within a social world outside the opera. Opera left this aesthetic behind as it moved into the second half of the eighteenth century, influenced by the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the works of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck among others.