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Alexander Pope: Selected Letters
Edited by Howard Erskine-Hill
432 pages
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frontispiece, 4 halftones
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216x138mm
978-0-19-818565-9
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Hardback
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29 June 2000
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- A generous selection from the letters of one of the greatest poets and most interesting letter-writers in the English language
- As well as writing brilliant literary letters on subjects as diverse as love, poetry, and politics, Pope edited much of his own correspondence for publication - often with substantial rewriting, and sometimes even with different recipients' names: the edition exposes the extent of this public refashioning of himself, and supplies fascinating insights into the poet's character
- The only edition of Pope's correspondence currently available
- Edited by a notable scholar of Pope and his age
- Based on the great Shirburn edition, but with a new and illuminating commentary, biographical information on all individuals mentioned, and an analytical index.
Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable characterDSambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonisticDSthey also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its tragedies and exiles, its loves, its scandals, the movement of its religious, political, and philosophical ideas, its sense of poetry, and its notions of poetic craft and genre. Moreover, Pope published a collection of his own
letters: a selective and highly edited collection, in which (having retrieved the originals from some recipients) he revised their texts and on occasion claimed they had been written to other people. This came to light with the nineteenth-century discovery of transcripts of the original letters, made for Pope's correspondent Lord Caryll. Other letters preserved in the British Library's Homer MS are clearly ones the poet would not have chosen to keep, since he used their backs for drafts of his Iliad translation.
George Sherburn's scholarly five-volume Collected Correspondence (Oxford, 1956) is the necessary basis for any new edition. The collection presented here is in the first place a balanced and varied selection from Sherburn. Since 1956, however, many new
letters have been discovered, and this volume includes most of them. Many are among Pope's best, though they have till now been scattered in learned journals.
This selection supplies an introduction, a commentary on each letter identifying allusions and quotations (with translations where necessary), and thematic and biographical indexes.Readership: All interested in Pope and his circle of friends, acquaintances, and enemies.
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Edited by Howard Erskine-Hill, Professor of Literary History, Faculty of English, Cambridge University
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"The best thing to come from this collection is a sense of Pope less as a combative satirist than as a private and religious individual, whose love of "romantic" (his word) landscapes infused much of what he wrote" - David Nokes, Times Literary Supplement
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Introduction
Note on the Text
LETTERS
Biographical Index
Analytical Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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