Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope and Gay

Overview

Slavery played an important part in early eighteenth-century English society. It created markets, provided goods and drove political decision. It also exerted an influence on the ways in which people behaved and thought. Some of the mental habits associated with slavery are to be found in the writing of the period. Slavery and Augustan Literature investigates slavery in the work of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. These three writers were connected with a Tory ministry, which attempted to increase substantially the English share of the international slave trade. They all wrote in support of the treaty that was meant to effect that increase. The book begins with contemporary ideas about slavery, with the Tory ministry years and with texts written during those years. These texts tend to obscure the importance of the slave trade to Tory planning. In its second half, the book analyses the attitudes towards slavery in Pope''s Horatian poems, An Essay on Man, Polly, A Modest Proposal and Gulliver''s Travels. John Richardson shows how, despite differences, Swift, Pope and Gay adopt a mixed position of admiration for freedom alongside implicit support for slavery. Slavery and Augustan Literature provides valuable insights into eighteenth-century attitudes towards slavery, and the relation of literature to society. It also offers new readings of major Augustan texts and will be of essential interest to students and researchers of eighteenth-century literature

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews for this product are not available at this time.

Author Information

Bio of John Richardson

John Richardson was born in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to Provence, where he helped the collector Douglas Cooper transform the Ch�teau de Castille near Avignon into a private museum of cubist painting. For the next twelve years he lived in France where he became friends with Picasso, Braque, L�ger, and Cocteau. With Picasso's encouragement he embarked on an analytic study of the artist's portraits, part of which is incorporated in the present biography. In the early 1960s Richardson went to live in New York City where he was appointed head of Christie's U.S. operation. Besides having organized various exhibitions, he has written books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The first volume of his Life of Picasso was published to wide acclaim in 1991 and won England's prestigious Whitbread Prize. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where he is working on the third and fourth volumes of this biography.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Taylor & Francis

Filesize

1.14 MB

Number of Pages

224

eBook ISBN

9780203495742