In an impressive blend of biography and literary assessment, John Paul Russo views Alexander Pope’s life as it illuminates the major themes and tendencies of his poetry, and his poetry as it reflects the ideals of the man. His main concern is the interaction of Pope’s growing identity with his continual interest in classical Western poetic and moral traditions. Russo focuses initially on the basic biographical facts that contributed to Pope’s identity as man and as poet. He then shifts his attention to the artistic ideals that from the beginning affected Pope’s conduct of life as well as his work.

“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.

Like the miniatures of which Pope was so fond, the book is at once particular in its focus and wide-ranging in its conceptual scope. While drawing on recent feminist, historicist, and materialist criticism of Pope, as well as current theoretical work on the body, it also attends closely to the local ambiguities of the poet’s texts and cultural milieu, details often lost to critical view. The result is a revitalized—and broadened—reading of Pope, and of our understanding of the processes of authorship. By focusing on the process by which ideas of authority and authenticity took shape at specific moments in Pope’s career, Resemblance and Disgrace calls into question distinctions between theoretical abstractions and material details, between literary originality and critical derivation, following Pope’s own example of rewriting intellectual boundaries as creative opportunities.