The Poet and the Publisher
The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street
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- 28,99 €
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- 28,99 €
Publisher Description
“Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher.”—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
“What sets Rogers’s history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat.”—Publishers Weekly
The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles, and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rogers (Edmund Curll, Bookseller), a liberal arts professor at the University of South Florida, dives deep into 18th-century English poet, satirist, and translator Alexander Pope and his fraught relationship with the bookseller and publisher Edmund Curll, in this entertaining history. Pope authored such works as Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728), and his bad blood with Curll began after Curll published of poems falsely attributed to Pope in 1716. The highbrow Pope was concerned that his name would be sullied by being associated with a publisher whose stock in the trade was such topics as naughty nuns. Their feud was also fueled by the fact that Pope was a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholicism was rampant—and Curll's political leanings were toward the Protestant-friendly Walpole government. Rogers's account is chock-full of original literary and historical research, and is impressive in its scope: he details many rhetorical battles between the two, culminating in Pope's inclusion of "shameless Curll" as a venereal disease–ridden dunce in The Dunciad. Curll also purchased and published a set of Pope's private letters without the author's permission and proceeded to print more volumes of assorted "Popiana" to which he didn't own the rights. What sets Rogers's history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat.
