Neoclassical Poetics Research Articles

Неоклассицизм в архитектуре 1900–1910-х годов и поэзии акмеизма: к вопросу общности проблемного поля

The article attempts to compare the programs of Neoclassicism in Russian architecture and poetry of the 1900s and 1910s. The convergence of two unrelated types of art allows however to reveal the commonality of the problem field. The similarity was revealed in the following issues: the chronological boundaries of the style, ideological attitudes among neoclassicists, perception of historical tradition, actualization of the problem of mastery, and terminology used. The field of neoclassical poetics and architecture is also united by the contradictory goals of the style: the revival of the classical ideal is impossible in the situation of multidirectional stylistic trends of the art in the beginning of the century. The interdisciplinary analysis of the poetics and architecture of neoclassicism has allowed us to understand the position of architecture in the board context of neoclassical culture and to point out that the formation of the architectural style is determined by the unity of the artistic process.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Rhapsodies, Books, Episodes and Suspense. The Problematic Division of the Epic in 18th-Century Neoclassical Poetics

Aux xviie et xviiie siècles, l’épopée est l’un des genres les plus codifiés par la poétique classique, et les épopées composées par les poètes modernes sont systématiquement divisées en chants (ou livres). Pourtant ces divisions ne font pas l’objet d’une réflexion théorique comparable, par exemple, aux divisions du drame (l’acte et la scène) qui sont théorisées comme les instruments de la dispositio. On étudie ici les différentes dimensions de ce vide poétologique, en partant de l’article « Chant » rédigé par Diderot pour l’Encyclopédie, et en remontant aux sources antiques de la tradition néo-aristotélicienne. Il apparaît que le chant (ou livre) épique est un segment textuel hétéroclite au statut ambigu, au croisement d’approches matérielles et narratologiques de la disposition épique.

The dancing bear from Spain

Abstract The article depicts the intense and at times unpredictable fable transfer in eighteenth-century Europe by tracing the source text of one of the most acclaimed works in Swedish fable history, Anna Maria Lenngren’s “Björndansen” [The dance of the bear]. This verse fable, published in Stockholms Posten in 1799 and bringing questions of literary quality and literary criticism into focus, was classified by the poet herself as “Original.” Twentieth-century scholars have identified a prose fable, “Björnen, Apan och Swinet” [The bear, the ape, and the swine], printed in the same daily paper in 1784 and translated from Spanish, as her probable source text. Eagerness to safeguard the poetical autonomy of Lenngren seems, though, to have restrained scholars from trying to find the Spanish original of the prose translation or to detect its author. Following the trails of French and German renderings of the Spanish fable about the dancing bear, the article demonstrates that “Björndansen” is a skilful Swedish recasting of “El Oso, la Mona y el Cerdo” [The bear, the ape, and the swine], one of the 67 verse fables in Tomás de Iriarte’s innovative Fábulas literarias (1782), a collection presenting a neoclassical poetics in the form of fable. Placing “Björndansen” within this larger international fable historical context, the article also manages, by means of comparative analysis, to throw new light on the literary devices of the Swedish masterpiece.

“Look No More”: Jonson's Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France by Christopher Semk

Reviewed by: Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France by Christopher Semk Katherine Ibbett Christopher Semk. Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France BUCKNELL UP, 2017. 172 PP. CHRISTOPHER SEMK'S ADMIRABLE NEW BOOK puts sacramental theology at the heart of an evolution in French neoclassical poetics, drawing on the test case of a set of seventeenth-century dramas about Christian Martyrdom. The sudden appearance and disappearance of these Martyr plays on the French stage is often read as an exploration of secular sovereignty and political power. In contrast, Semk's work seeks to account for the innovations of this theatrical mode by placing it firmly within the context of contemporary theological debates. If the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole worried that the writers of Martyr dramas made their leading roles rather more like ancient Roman heroes than saints, Semk suggests that such a jibe underestimates the rich and nuanced ways in which Martyr drama engaged theological questions. In so doing, he argues compellingly for the significance of religious belief to the elaboration of poetics in the French context. Semk's account insists on the theater as a place where things happen: even before we get to his chapter on the actor-Martyr Genesius, he asks "not what Martyrological theater is, but rather what Martyrological theater does" (xviii). Questions about the place of belief and faith in the theatrical experiment permeate his work, and the most refreshing parts of the book, for this reader, come when a sense of faith's wondrous difficulties bolsters his investigations. Semk gives real insights into particular dramatic debates of the period, arguing persuasively that the test case of the Martyrological theater brought Aristotelian poetics up against its limits. But the real strength of the book is that it allows for a broader understanding of the place of the religious within a rapidly professionalizing theatrical scene. Chapter 1 takes up a broad account of relations between church and stage in the period. In echoing today's debates about established religion, its title, "The Separation of Church and Stage," suggests something of what is at stake in taking religion seriously as a cultural matrix for the theater. Semk's opening pages are stirring. He begins with the most concrete of material evidence: a stone escutcheon representing the Passion that, for much of the seventeenth [End Page 171] century, stood over the doorway of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the leading theater of the day. Semk reads this sacred representation—a remnant of the time before the confraternity who owned the theater had been blocked from performing religious plays—as a "haunting" of the new-model French stage by an older and more openly sacred corpus. From this arresting beginning, he goes on to investigate the complex imbrications of the sacred and the theatrical. This allows him to explore a broader range of representations than those usually encountered in scholarly work on the theater; Semk takes seriously a range of plays from the French provinces—I was especially struck by the examples he draws from François d'Avre's 1668 Dipné, Infante d'Irlande, since one of the virtues of Semk's approach is that it allows us to think more about French theater's relations to non-French textual traditions. This chapter gives a firmly useful overview of seventeenth-century religious responses to the theater, both for and against it, and, most importantly, gives us a more complex picture of the role of faith and belief in debates about fictiveness and poetics. Chapter 2 takes up the question of the place of spectacle within Martyrological theater. In accounting for the success of stories that privilege the Martyr's suffering body at a time when such bodies were largely excluded from the stage, Semk digs into a complex tradition of reading spectacle. Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition, he inquires into the relations between pathos and opsis, often taking issue with translators or scholars today who have not allowed for sufficient nuance in their understanding of that framework. Semk's careful work sets the context for a persuasive reading of the various staged accounts of the death of Saint Eustache, and...

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness by Rhodri Lewis

Reviewed by: Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness by Rhodri Lewis Bríd Phillips Lewis, Rhodri, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 392; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$39.95, £32.95; ISBN 9780691166841. In this monograph on Hamlet, we are treated to a new and startling perspective on a familiar subject. Rhodri Lewis begins with a nod to Maria de Grazia’s insistence that in the field of Hamlet studies it is necessary that we start again and rethink the approaches that have shaped so much of the critical body to date. Lewis supports his ground-breaking theories with a critical approach that is both thorough and systematic. His conclusions are provocative but there is a considerable weight of research behind each statement, which gives his readers food for thought and an opportunity for fruitful counter-argument. In this spirit, Lewis advocates exploring the ‘formal, cultural, intellectual, and historical’ (p. 6) aspects surrounding the play in order to do it justice. The first two chapters on humanism and hunting set up an argument based on the premise that Shakespeare ‘came to find humanist philosophy deficient in the face of human experience as he observed it’ (p. 26). Lewis deftly demonstrates the importance of the hunt in Hamlet, arguing that it serves as a tool for Shakespeare to demonstrate the shortcomings of humankind. Cicero exemplified the negativity associated with astutia and calliditas by means of hunting metaphors, which Shakespeare utilized and expanded to suggest that cunning and self-interest are the stock-in-trade of human affairs. By discussing these ideas, Lewis is able to demonstrate that Hamlet is, therefore, a character who is alienated not only from the world around him but also from himself. The next three chapters focus on Hamlet as historian, as poet, and as philosopher. In Chapter 3 Lewis harnesses the recent critical turn to memory and its importance to illustrate how remembering can be linked to the discourse of reason. As the latter is synonymous with the morally responsible human agent, Lewis shows how we can reconsider Hamlet’s thoughts on the memory of his father. Lewis concludes that Hamlet is not impeded by excess of remembrance [End Page 220] when it comes to enacting revenge, but rather he does not remember his father as he and the Ghost think he should. The memory of his father does not ever have enough force to motivate revenge, explaining his hesitation. In this paradigm, Hamlet, Fortinbras, and Laertes, while supposedly honouring memories of their dead fathers, are in reality remembering themselves and their own interests. Turning to poetry, Lewis asserts that Shakespeare uses Hamlet as a vehicle to illustrate the inadequacies of neoclassical poetics current in the early modern period. He demonstrates that Hamlet’s discussions on The Mousetrap serve to underscore the character’s lack of emotional investment in Old Hamlet’s demise. Within this chapter Lewis is at pains to demonstrate that Hamlet is not concerned with creating an illusion of reality; rather, through the inset of The Murder of Gonzago, we are shown a world that is used to understanding its experience through different sorts of fiction. In Chapter 5, Lewis argues that Hamlet is not the philosopher and critical thinker that many academic writers believe him to be. Instead Lewis posits that Hamlet is a ‘thinker of unrelenting superficiality, confusion, and pious self-deceit’ (p. 238). With regard to that most iconic Shakespearean soliloquy, ‘to be or not to be’, Lewis asserts that the diversity of interpretations is predicated on its jumbled confusion of superficial humanism. Lewis points out that this soliloquy is, in fact, a quaestio, a subject of contention in a rhetorical debate that in philosophical terms should be connected to a real-world problem. Lewis effectively argues that, although Hamlet regards himself as a philosopher, his thoughts are ‘the ill-arranged and ill-digested harvest of his bookish education’ (p. 277). The question of providence comes under scrutiny as Lewis adroitly reveals it as a tool for Hamlet to hide his lack of concern over the murder of Polonius. Lewis concludes that, ‘[f]or Shakespeare, fortune and fate are...

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

The Tragicomic Moment: Republicanism in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher inaugurated their collaboration on a series of popular tragicomedies their play, Philaster, Or Love Lies a-Bleeding, a success soon followed by A King and No King. (1) While their tragicomedies were remarkably popular audiences and influential on other playwrights throughout seventeenth century, burgeoning genre of tragicomedy was also maligned as an aesthetically impure form of drama for its mingling of comedy and tragedy, seemingly against decorum of neoclassical poetics. This prejudice against Fletcherian tragicomedy is visible in modern critical history as well, though for different reasons: notion that genre supports politics has been a commonplace at least since Coleridge's lectures and notes on Shakespeare, in which he indicts Beaumont and Fletcher for their presumed ultra-royalism, describing them as the most servile jure divino royalist in their political opinions, and as high-flying, passive-obedience, Tories whose ideology contrasts badly Shakespeare's serene adherence to permanent politics of nature. (2) Coleridge's judgment on Beaumont and Fletcher is characteristic of critical discourse on tragicomedy, and Fletcherian drama in particular, that takes conciliatory endings of genre as support for its claims, since these endings seem to affirm, rather than to trouble, monarchical and absolutist authority. (3) Such critics as Franco Moretti have argued that early modern tragedy tends to subvert absolutist monarchy by staging deaths of kings. (4) But can we find a similarly subversive undercurrent in tragicomedy and in Beaumont and Fletcher? Specifically, can we identify a republican politics in a genre and among authors typically considered antithetical to republican concerns? If we look at theoretical formulations of Giovanni Battista Guarini in his 1601 Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, which Fletcher almost certainly had read and taken as a model for his 1609 preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (itself indebted to Guarini's II Pastor Fido), we can locate surprising political possibilities for tragicomedy. In defending his own dramatic practice against critics who upheld generic purity of tragedy and comedy as defined by Aristotle, Guarini argues for superior modernity of tragicomedy. The norms of classical tragedy could no longer be binding, Guarini claims, for the precepts of our most holy religion, which teaches us word of gospel had rendered horrible and savage spectacles of tragedy superfluous for contemporary Christian audiences; meanwhile, comedy had been rendered tedious by mediocrity of mercenary and sordid persons, requiring tragicomic playwrights, following steps of Menander and Terence, to restore seriousness to comedy by combining with pleasing parts of comedy those parts of tragedy that can suitably accompany comic scenes to such an extent that they strive for purgation of sadness. (5) To show that such a mingling of tragic and comic elements could produce a new form superior to either tragedy or comedy in their pure forms, Guarini cites examples of biological and chemical mixtures in nature and, more importantly, political example of republic in human relations: (6) Does not Aristotle say that tragedy is made up of persons of high rank and comedy of men of people? Let us give an example of men of rank and men of people. The republic is such a thing. I do not say this in respect to its material, for every city is of necessity composed of nobles and those who are not noble, of rich and poor, ... but I speak of forms that spring from diversity of these two, that is, power of few and power of masses. Are not these two Species of government very different among themselves? If we believe Aristotle, or even pure reason, there is no doubt of it; yet Philosopher puts them together and makes of them mixture of republic. …

Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century by Claudia Thomas Kairoff

Book Reviews Claudia Thomas Kairoff. Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii+308. $55. In an 1807 letter to Walter Scott, Anna Seward (1742-1809) disparaged Wordsworth as an “egotistic manufacturer of metaphysical importance upon trivial themes” (194). This Keatsian tidbit in Claudia Kairoff’s Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century underscores not only Seward’s at times acerbic wit but also her “defense ofprinciples threatened by emer­ gent Romantic values” (162). Such Augustan “principles” are everywhere on display in this comprehensive exploration of Seward’s verse. From her repeated use ofpersonification to her emphasis on decorum and propriety, Seward appears as “one of the last neoclassicists,” as Paula Backscheider puts it (162), or in Kairoff’s words, “essentially an eighteenth-century poet” (ix). As the monograph’s title also telegraphs, Kairoffclaims that Seward’s po­ etry stands as an inflection point, “the missing link between Augustan and Romantic writing, combining a sophisticated knowledge of prosody with her ability to dramatize sensibility” (17). Kairoff repeatedly finds Seward “anticipating” (3, 6, 7, 8, etc.) the canonic figures with whom she was con­ temporary in her later years: most often Wordsworth, but also Blake and Jane Austen. The Romanticism sketched by Kairoff is less than nuanced, with all the accent on feeling and solipsism, as though “sophisticated pros­ ody” were abandoned after the French Revolution. No one would deny that verse primitivism became vital with the Romantics, most famously through the ballad revival, but Byron, Shelley, and Keats are certainly as “sophisticated” prosodists as any of the 18th century. The second-generation Romantics are not really Kairoff’s concern so much as a subdisciplinary periodization that has “marginalized” (3) the poet she is championing. She aims to counteract “nearly two hundred years of critical neglect” (1) by showing how Seward’s work “elucidates the eighteenth-century roots of many Romantic-era trends” (3). And yet, at the same time, Kairoff assails the application of Romantic standards to Seward. Instead of treating Seward as “a victim” (26) as in her first chapter on the poet’s fall from critical grace, “Under Suspicious Circumstances,” Kairoff might have benefited from considering how other neoclassical po­ ets of the Romantic period (Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, among SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 459 460 BOOK REVIEWS others) have likewise been critically disappeared, and from considering in broader terms the era’s controversies over neoclassical poetics. Kairoff aims to rehabilitate Seward as “an important poet” (31) by dis­ crediting the apparently widespread belief that she wrote “indifferent verse,” in Germaine Greer’s words (26). Value is located in Seward’s “beautifully crafted lines” and “technical agility” (136). In Kairoff, Seward has found a most generous reader, who never fails to identify how the po­ ems “rewardf ] attentive reading” (44). This formal analysis forces us to concede that Seward did indeed “labor[ ] to create mellifluous sound pat­ terns in her verse” (230). But Kairoff’s stress on technique also makes patent Seward’s disavowal of “metaphysical importance.” From our Ro­ manticist perspective, we cannot help but notice the neoclassical tendency to subordinate complex issues to grand gestures and often-inconsequential “mellifluous” effect. We may be more sympathetic to Walter Scott and his Wordsworthian critiques ofthe poet than to Kairoff’s outrage at his “insid­ ious tone” (19) and “condescending attitude” (23). If we overlook this polemic on “neglected” genius, however, Kairoff’s study helpfully illuminates the social circumstances under which a “lady” might have composed poetry in Seward’s day. In chapters 2 and 3, we wit­ ness Seward’s first forays into verse at salons where poetic contests were held. Kairoff shows how poetry production featured in the life of the gen­ tility and how the “amateur” poet could practice for later “professional” excursions. At the same time, Kairoff reminds us that the locus romanticus of the solitary stroller was not one Seward could easily inhabit: “the typical lady, hardly ever expected to venture forth without a servant or compan­ ion, had no hope of approaching, let alone fulfilling, that ideal” (52). Such limitations did not force Seward into the role of “a retiring domes­ tic...

Milton among the Puritans: the case for historical revisionism

Contents: Preface Introduction: Carlyle's ghost Part I The Revolutionary Era: Historical Overview and Analysis of Milton's Early Works: A brief history of the 'Puritan revolution' Milton among the Puritans Vocation, prophecy, and secular reform in the early poems and prose The humanist ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics of Milton's Spenserian masque Mid-century debates on law, religion, rhetoric, education and science. Part II Restoration Culture and Milton's Major Works: The secular cosmology and anthropology of Milton's civilized Eden The neoclassical poetics of Paradise Regained The classical republican tragedy of defeat in Samson Agonistes Afterword: Milton and the early development of toleration in England Bibliography Index.

Wasting Time in Ben Jonson's Epicoene

[T I| a ime, declares Truewit in Epicoene's opening scene, because it is an incorporeall thing, and not subiect to sense, we mocke ourselues the fineliest out of it.' For all its incorporeality, though, is of the utmost importance for Epicoene and Jonson's poetics generally. Time anchors the conceptualization of the proper re lationship between nature and art at the center of Jonson's neoclassical poetics. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson does not oppose his art to a De vouring time from whose rival pen he seeks to rescue the objects of his poetry.2 In both his epideictic poetry and his satire, Jonson seeks mimetically not to rival but to imitate time. Jonson's poetry of praise and those whom Jonson praises imitate an idealized and patriarchal version of natural time: cyclical yet productive, natural balances stasis and change to provoke awareness and acceptance of temporal finitude. Jonson directs his satire against those who through various arts-from poetry to cosmetics-seek to escape natural for other, artificial and effeminizing temporal horizons characterized by disrup tion, sterility and waste. Epicoene is an extended and complex example of such satire. Its fictional world is a consumer society in which what is ultimately consumed is time; the satiric selves who inhabit this fictional world do not imitate but deny nature and natural time, fashioning them selves through a poesis that runs away from nature to occupy an artifi cial temporal horizon constituted by the wasteful and seemingly ster

Liking Men: Ben Jonson's Closet Opened

I. Prologue: "You . . . May Like Men" My title, "Liking Men" alludes to the last two lines of the verse prologue with which Jonson prefaced Every Man in His Humor when he revised it for the prestigious publication event of the folio collection of his works to date in 1616. The prologue to Every Man In must be one of the most cited and least understood of Jonson's poems. Critics pay tribute, by quoting the speech, to the bracing rhythms of its announcement that something entirely new is going to start happening in English drama, but they hardly seem, in subsequent analyses, to appreciate either the long-term dramatic effects, or the wider cultural ramifications of the novelty it announces. Jonson, it is said, has with this prologue to this play introduced a new realism to English drama, through a parodic rejection of older dramatic styles.1 My argument here is that Jonson's cultural influence and creative power deserve greater credit. His formal innovation announced in the 1616 prologue both created a completely new and exceptionally durable style of urban bachelor fiction and, simultaneously, founded a no less culturally influential style of masculine intimacy. The new style of fiction, "overwhelmingly the dominant one until recent years" in English theater, is signaled by its "real-time" opening with the leisured morning activities of London gentlemen, and has endured in the English comic tradition from Restoration comedy to Noel Coward.2 The new style of masculine intimacy which became inseparable (as Eve Sedgwick has shown us) from later developments in these urbane fictions of leisured bachelorhood is what I hope to describe in this essay. I shall, in short, be attempting to analyze Every Man in His Humor as contributing crucially to the transformation of cultural attitudes towards male same-sex desire which Alan Bray demonstrated as having taken place in the course of the seventeenth century, and which Sedgwick has mapped out across various post-Renaissance literary genres as producing "intense male [End Page 1065] homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory, and the most prohibited of social bonds."3 In the prologue to the revised text of Every Man In, Jonson distinguishes the play that he presents as the "first fruits" of his dramatic career from the offerings of the more popular Shakespearean tradition, in which playwrights disregarded neoclassical poetics, happily ignoring the principle of unity of time. He declares that he has not "so loved the stage" as to follow the example of his contemporaries, who . . . make a child, now swaddled to proceed Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars.4 The often-heard complaint of earlier humanist authors against the chronicle drama's violations of temporal probability is here given a peculiarly Jonsonian inflection in the reference to "three rusty swords" and the quick-changes of "wounds to scars" backstage. Jonson, unlike Shakespeare, persistently draws attention to the "inert materiality" and "creaking contrivances" of theater.5 Here, of course, the demystification of these contrivances works to invalidate any techniques of illusion except for those of linguistic currency and contemporaneity. Jonson's play, unlike those chronicle histories of Shakespeare, will seem real because it offers images of "deeds, and language, such as men do use" in contemporary life, enlivened by examples of the unmanly commission of "popular errors": I mean such errors as you'll all confess By laughing at them, they deserve no less: Which, when you heartily do, there's hope left then You that have so grac'd monsters may like men. ("Prologue," 26-30) The errors to be staged in Jonson's play for the delectation of the audience, then, are aspects of those plays they have elsewhere applauded or "grac'd." These will be on display as "monsters," foils...

Mauvais Genres

What is genre theory a theory of? This paper argues that genre theory is an inquiry into the formation of fundamental categories of interpretation in history, where even the question of whether literary and rhetorical genres are in themselves fundamental is left open. Efforts to theorize genre are therefore beset by paradox since the categories that matter at any given time may not be literary or rhetorical genres. "Mauvais Genres" explores the paradox of genre through an analysis of the historical transition from a late Neoclassical poetics based upon genre to a modern system of philosophical aesthetics based upon trans-generic categories of the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime, categories that fulfill the genre-function even as they marginalize genre as a means of classifying and evaluating texts. Principal figures are Locke, Shaftesbury, Hartley, Berkeley, Hume, Reynolds, and Baillie.

Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

Acknowledgements and author's note 1. Introduction: cosmopolitanism, narrative, history 2. Voltaire's neoclassical poetics of history 3. European contexts in Hume's History of England 4. William Robertson to the rescue of Scottish history 5. Robertson on the triumph of Europe and its empires 6. Emulation and revival: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 7. David Ramsay's sceptical history of the American Revolution Afterword Bibliography Index.

The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists

The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists