Wordsworth’s Pope

Recent studies of the concepts and ideologies of Romanticism have neglected to examine 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.

• Radical and revisionary account of the concepts of Romanticism in the context of its literary past • New insights into eighteenth-century and Romantic literature as defined by Romantic writers • Exciting contribution to the broad study of literary history

Introduction; 1. The eighteenth-century construction of Romanticism; 2. Refinement, Romanticism, Francis Jeffrey; 3. Wordsworth’s Pope; 4. Mirror and lamp; Conclusion, with thoughts on method in literary historiography; Notes; Bibliography.

‘Robert Griffin’s book, with its odd combination of modesty and daring, is a refreshing challenge … and it ought to stimulate lively debate.’ David Fairer, Romanticism

‘Griffin’s is a remarkable and exciting book. And it is a good thing that it appears in Cambridge’s series, Studies in Romanticism: its argument is one that eighteenth-century scholars should not keep to themselves.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies

‘… this is a book to wrestle with, and to delight in - and certainly not to be neglected.’ The Scriblerian

‘Robert Griffin’s book, with its odd combination of modesty and daring, is a refreshing challenge to that established pattern, and it ought to stimulate lively debate.’ Romanticism