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Title: The Triumph of Augustan Poetics : English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson by Blanford Parker, Howard Erskine-Hill, John Richetti ISBN: 0-521-59088-4 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 11 June, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $70.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: One of the most important books in the field
Comment: ...Let me say that title of the book is indeed important. For this amazing work of scholarship traces the profound shift in poetics (esp. satire) from the Baroque (which inherited the culture of antiquity and the mediaeval period) to the 18th-c, which essentially is the beginning of modernity.

Parker is at ease discussing the ancient greeks as he is Robert Frost. We owe him a debt for his ingenious readings of Butler, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Swift too, gets some attention. He says something startling original about each, which is difficult to do. His reading of Pope's Rape of the Lock deserves to be read by every Pope scholar. He says one of the only truly remarkable things about Samuel Johnson that we've seen in criticsm in the last fifty years.

His thesis that the Augustan's use of satire as a levelling critique of an inherited culture is superb. For too long have we bought the Augustan's fabricated self-image that they projected (and our contemporary literary critics still claim): that the Augustans are the intellectual heirs to antiquity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pope and Co. employ a neo-classicism as a "false screen' to shield how truly radical and divergent they are from Homer and Virgil.

If you really believe that you are reading Lucian and the Mennippean when you read Sterne and Swift you are in trouble. The Augustans have a _superficial_ relationship to antiquity.

Speaking of those two: another point that Parker gets across brillantly is the "literalism' of the Augustan project and the evacuation of analogy (analogia entis) to being. He shows how 18th-c novels are constructed from the works of Butler and Pope.

All critics of the novel should read this book. All those who are interested in "Augustan England' should read this book. All those who are interested in satire should read this book.

All the print reviews of this book (I've read seven or eight) have been more than positive. Mid-level professionals may hold a grudge against this book, but I doubt whether you'd find one highly esteemed and established scholar who would not say that it is a heroic and erudite account of the 17th and 18th-c.

While Parker is intimidating because he is as at home with Theocritus as he is with Colerdige, none can deny that his style - elegant, fluid, graceful, devoid of cant - is magesterial.

Rating: 5
Summary: One of the most important books in the field
Comment: The reader from Seattle appears to have some sort of grudge. I noticed he wrote something equally penetrating on the B&N website.

Let me say that title of the book is indeed important. For this amazing work of scholarship traces the profound shift in poetics (esp. satire) from the Baroque (which inherited the culture of antiquity and the mediaeval period) to the 18th-c, which essentially is the beginning of modernity.

Parker is at ease discussing the ancient greeks as he is Robert Frost. We owe him a debt for his ingenious readings of Butler, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Swift too, gets some attention. He says something startling original about each, which is difficult to do. His reading of Pope's Rape of the Lock deserves to be read by every Pope scholar. He says one of the only truly remarkable things about Samuel Johnson that we've seen in criticsm in the last fifty years.

His thesis that the Augustan's use of satire as a levelling critique of an inherited culture is superb. For too long have we bought the Augustan's fabricated self-image that they projected (and our contemporary literary critics still claim): that the Augustans are the intellectual heirs to antiquity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pope and Co. employ a neo-classicism as a "false screen' to shield how truly radical and divergent they are from Homer and Virgil.

If you really believe that you are reading Lucian and the Mennippean when you read Sterne and Swift you are in trouble. The Augustans have a _superficial_ relationship to antiquity.

Speaking of those two: another point that Parker gets across brillantly is the "literalism' of the Augustan project and the evacuation of analogy (analogia entis) to being. He shows how 18th-c novels are constructed from the works of Butler and Pope.

All critics of the novel should read this book. All those who are interested in "Augustan England' should read this book. All those who are interested in satire should read this book.

All the print reviews of this book (I've read seven or eight) have been more than positive. Mid-level professionals may hold a grudge against this book, but I doubt whether you'd find one highly esteemed and established scholar who would not say that it is a heroic and erudite account of the 17th and 18th-c.

While Parker is intimidating because he is as at home with Theocritus as he is with Colerdige, none can deny that his style - elegant, fluid, graceful, devoid of cant - is magesterial.

Rating: 5
Summary: Assessing the Eighteenth Century
Comment: Blanford Parker's _The Triumph of Augustan Poetics_ is the most important reassessment of eighteenth-century literary culture to appear in the past ten years. A work of extraordinary erudition which is nevertheless accessible to the nonspecialist, this study explains many of the peculiarities of eighteenth-century literature: the prevalence of acidic satire as a dominant mode of thought, the tendency of Augustan writers to excoriate all bodies of received religious authority, and the emergence of empirical observation as a poetic technique. Parker contextualizes these trends within the historical chaos of England's civil wars. He offers a brilliantly cohesive -- yet never simplistic -- explanation of that which most scholars of the period have been unable to account for: the unique and disturbing misanthropy of the period's major literary texts. His final chapter on Samuel Johnson, which sensitively describes the divided consciousness evident in Johnson's writing, is beyond praise.