Alexander Pope was, at one time, the world's most celebrated poet. His trenchant satirical works - in which the foibles of all the critics, hacks and bad poets of his day are exploded - and his masterful heroi-comic poem The Rape of the Lock continue to inspire generations of writers and readers to this day. Alongside his more prominent poetical production, Pope engaged with some of the sharpest wits of his era - including Jonathan Swift and John Gay, the author of The Beggar's Opera - in writing a number of satirical prose works, of which Scriblerus is perhaps the greatest achievement.As he prepares to become father for the first time, the scholar Cornelius is determined to settle on nothing less than a child of the "e;learned sex"e; - a boy - and give him the most thorough education so that he can become the greatest critic who ever lived. An account of the birth, the infancy, the schooling, the diet-planning, the unconventional love affairs and the attainments of this child prodigy, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is surely the funniest imaginary biography ever written.

This 18th-century satire is the product of a distinguished club whose members included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley. Together they set out to lampoom bad taste in education and the arts by lampooning the errors and pretensions of the fictional Martinus Scriblerus. This long-neglected masterpiece is accompanied by a preface that sets the Scriblerus club in its historical context and extensive notes that illuminate both thematic content and allusions. Still highly entertaining, the work is also an invaluable source of information on Augustan tastes.

Throughout his life, Pope was fascinated by print. He loved its elements: dropped heads, italics, small capitals; fine paper and good ink; headpieces, tailpieces, initials, and plates. And he loved playing games with publication: anonymity, pseudonymity, false imprints, fake title-pages,advertisements, special editions, and variant texts.This is the first study to take Pope's experiments in print as a guide to interpretation. Each chapter is devoted to a particular book or text and focuses on how Pope expresses meaning through print. The Rape of the Lock, Dunciad Variorum, Essay on Man, early imitations of Horace, and Epistle to DrArbuthnot are read through their illustrations, annotations, parallel texts, title-pages, and revisions. Independent chapters are devoted to Pope's Works of 1717 and 1735-6, discussing his self-presentation and his relation to his readers. He emerges from the study as a figure marginalized socially,politically, and sexually, an author who gambles with his private life in confronting his opponents.

Parody was a crucial technique for the satirists and novelists associated with the Scriblerus Club. The great eighteenth-century wits (Alexander Pope, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne) often explored the limits of the ugly, the droll, the grotesque and the insane by mocking, distorting and deconstructing multiple discourses, genres, modes and methods of representation. This book traces the continuity and difference in parodic textuality from Pope to Sterne. It focuses on polyphony, intertextuality and deconstruction in parodic genres and examines the uses of parody in such texts as «The Beggar’s Opera», «The Dunciad», «Joseph Andrews» and «Tristram Shandy». The book demonstrates how parody helped the modern novel to emerge as a critical and artistically self-conscious form.

Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is needed to advance our understanding of a writer's philosophy.

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

The Kingdom of Science examines Baconian utopias as blueprints for a scientific sociologyøof knowledge that founded a new social and economic world in the seventeenth century. Looking backward, Paul A. Olson begins with More's Utopia and Shakespeare's The Tempest, static state utopias designed to woo us toward a moral as opposed to a scientific reform. To these, Olson then contrasts the primary subjects of his study?Bacon's New Atlantis, the Commonwealth educational utopias, and the utopianism of Adam Smith and his Utilitarian followers. These later utopias increasingly point to an ideal world to be dominated by a science linked to technology, compelled education, and competitive capitalism. They posit as their end the conquest of nature and use as their means the routinizing of research and education. Their visions, Olson argues, lie at the center of the educational models adopted by mainstream British and American policymakers in the last century and a half?despite the warnings of both conservative and radical critics concerning their potential consequences for the environment and for culture. The challenge Olson presents for those responsible for forging our social future is creating visions sufficient to energize human groups while allowing both for the critical reflection necessary for constructive policy debate and for the action necessary to prevent environmental chaos and cultural disruption. The Kingdom of Science is a companion to Olson's earlier book, The Journey to Wisdom, and carries the assumptions of that patristic-medieval study into the early-modern and modern periods.