Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy

By Claude Willan

This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention.

The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, and what could we use it for, he provocatively asks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503635272

Book preview

LITERARY AUTHORITY

An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy

Claude Willan

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2023 by Claude Willan. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022025214

ISBN: 9781503630864 (cloth), 9781503635272 (ebook)

Cover design: Zoe Norvell

Cover art: Old Wisdom Blinking at the Stars, by James Gillray. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. Whig Prose Cultures

CHAPTER 2. I love with all my heart: Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript

CHAPTER 3. Dipt in Ink: Pope without Pope in His Early Career

CHAPTER 4. Pope’s Moderate Ascendancy

CHAPTER 5. Samuel Johnson’s Struggle with Pope

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Richard Owen Cambridge’s print Dr. Johnson’s Ghost shows the Doctor surprising Boswell at work on a tapestry of materials, piecing together The Life of Johnson. The Ghost addresses Boswell with a quotation from Congreve’s Way of the World: Thou are a Retailer of Phrases, / And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, / Like a Maker of Pincushions. In its happiest instances, literary scholarship may aspire to the condition of a pincushion, and I have had the opportunity to count myself among those makers during the writing of this book. So many people have been so generous with their insights that my task has seemed much closer to the faithful assembly of found fragments than the manufacture of something out of whole cloth. If the reader feels that this pincushion is poorly stuffed, or the stitching awry, the fault lies only with the maker, not with the materials I have been gifted by mentors, teachers, colleagues, friends, and students. Likewise, whether the reader ultimately finds this study an ignominious victory or a glorious defeat, the responsibility is mine alone.

This book’s first life was more than ably directed by John Bender and Blair Hoxby, both of whom gave copiously of their time and advocacy, marrying scholarship, encouragement, and circumspection with judicious splashes of ice water. Denise Gigante’s attentive work as a reader had an instrumental effect on the argument at many points. That work could not have been completed without a Stanford Modern British Histories and Cultures grant, an ASECS / Walter Jackson Bate fellowship to work at the Houghton Library, a fellowship from Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library, a fellowship from the Firestone Library at Princeton, and a fellowship from the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies at UCLA to work in the Clark Library.

The Special Collections librarians at those libraries deserve particular mention. The level of care, knowledge, and engagement shown by staff on every level at the Houghton, the Beinecke, the Lewis Walpole, the Clark, the Firestone, and the Bodleian was extraordinarily high, consistently, for many years. This book simply could not exist but for the depth of their expertise and their profoundly able assistance.

At Stanford, I was lucky enough to benefit from seven years’ worth of provocations, insight, and good company of Allen Frost, Ryan Heuser, Long Le-Khac, and Talya Meyers. Dan Edelstein and Nicole Coleman were unfailingly welcoming, along with the rest of the Mapping the Republic of Letters cohort, particularly Melanie Conroy, Chloe Edmundson, and Maria Teodora Comsa. Judy Candell made the English department navigable; Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sami Amad, Erik Johnson, Steve Osadetz, Rebecca Richardson, Jenna Sutton, and James Wood made it livable. My final year as a graduate student, at Stanford’s Humanities Center on a Geballe fellowship, was perhaps the most intellectually nutritive I can remember, and allowed me to revise this work under ideal conditions. Lucy Alford, Joseph Boone, and Nate Sloan were fast friends found too late. In and around Princeton, Jean Bauer, Toni Bowers, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Paula McDowell, Meredith McGill, Marisa Nicosia, Stuart Sherman, Nigel Smith, and Kate Thorpe all freely offered their time, and warmth, and expertise. Pedro Dias and Jack and Laura Lynch provided me with role models and sustenance. At the University of Houston, I was lucky to work with Reid Boehm, Ann Christensen, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Elizabeth Irvin Stravoski, Sebastian LeCourt, Santi Thompson, and Emily Vinson, all of whom improved life in the subtropics.

Eighteenth-century studies has proven to be super-saturated with exceptional scholars of such warmth and solicitude that to call them mere colleagues demeans their value. This book is the richer, and I am the more fortunate, for the companionship, intellectual and otherwise, of Dave Alvarez, Rebecca Barr, Kevin Berland, Christoph Bode, Tita Chico, Al Coppola, Helen Deutsch, Chris Donaldson, Emily Friedman, Sören Hammerschmidt, Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Joe Hone, Collin Jennings, Sarah Kareem, Rachael Scarborough King, Crystal Lake, Kathleen Lubey, Jonathan Kramnick, Anton Matytsin, Laura Miller, James McLaverty, John McTague, Sandra MacPherson, Danny O’Quinn, Ben Pauley, Joe Roach, Rebecca Shapiro, Dustin Stewart, James Wooley, and Gena Zuroski. John Bender, Tasha Eccles, Morgan Frank, Christine Gerrard, Dave Mazella, John Richetti, and Elaine Treharne did too much to list here. Emma Smith, Hugh Gazzard, Helen Spencer, and especially Jeri Johnson, have it all to answer for.

From conferences and deep into the texture of everyday life, Jacob Sider Jost, Andrew Bricker, and Seth Rudy have been sane, sanguine, kind, true friends. Rebecca Munson gave me many years of profound love and support, as did her parents, Ronald and Miriam. Mike Amherst, Mike Lesslie, Micha Lazarus, Sage Pearce-Higgins, Meredith Wallis, and Adam Weymouth endured.

Erica Wetter at the Stanford University Press has proven an immensely wise and patient editor, whose interventions fundamentally reoriented this book for the better. I am very fortunate to work with her and with the team at SUP, particularly Caroline McKusick and Peter Dreyer. Two anonymous reviewers read this book with imagination and sharp eyes.

Paul, Jeannie, Shelagh, and Roger offered unstinting material and emotional support. Dan, Elena, Otto, Patrick, and Terry were always kind, no matter how long my absence. Vanda Wilcox deserves special mention in these regards, and listened to more years of lectures about Pope and Jacobitism than ought be asked of a military historian. I thank her for lifting me up, and for tethering me to earth, as appropriate.

In Houston I found for the first time, united in my family, both the means by which, and the reasons why. And so this book is dedicated to all my boys.

Introduction

This book is the cultural history of the development of an idea so commonplace as barely to be worth stating: that through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic, cultural, and social power. When we read, we expect to be met with claims of veracity and urgency. But imaginative writing makes demands of a different order, pressing upon the reader a new way of seeing the world. Readers of imaginative writing then have a choice. Do they reject those demands, or do they give up sovereignty over their powers of judgment, and through that deference admit the text’s higher authority? That imaginative writing has this power seems almost backward. How did it come to be like this? And when? The idea that texts bring authority to their authors was invented at a particular time, and it had particular conditions of possibility. This book tells the story of that invention.

The more authoritative I am, the easier it is for my desires to override yours. And an authoritative text acts on its reader in the same way. However I override your intentions—whether with reason or emotion—my disruption is underwritten, eventually, by the threat of force. On the other hand, the more naked the exercise of power, especially in politics, the greater the risk of its depletion. Before the power of the king submitted completely to the rule of law, literary authority served as a device to both exercise and retain the power of appeals to force, whether in the guise of appeals to reason or to emotion. Literary authority was in its origins designed for the use of potentates that wanted to exercise their authority without expending it. During the period covered in this book, and owing particularly to the advent of elective monarchy and an increasingly powerful Parliament, literary authority became obsolete. That political necessity just didn’t exist anymore. Parliaments have other, less erratic methods at their disposal. But at that moment of obsolescence, when the parliamentary rule of law was almost entirely in the ascendant, the social and metaphorical structures of literary authority were intact and vacant, unoccupied, as it were, and ready to be given a new lease. Literary authority had always offered a bit of slippage to authors, working as a social function of the textual exercise of power. That slippage became complete: literary authority now centered on the writers themselves, and allowed them to exercise social power through, and over, the written word.

Classical literary authority was meted out according to access: playwrights had access to the theater, so central to Greek civic and political life; Virgil recited to the emperor Augustus and his family, and Horace addressed his patron, Maecenas. In later courtly and imperial states, literary authority was tightly and complexly enmeshed with patronage and political power. But as the modern era began to unfold in Europe in the seventeenth century, these kinds of authority increasingly became unmoored. Ideas like public opinion, and the notion of a public itself, emerged.¹ How, then, might a transformed literary authority be anchored? And what would the point of it be?

My answers to these questions cluster around three issues. First, a discourse emerged about the intellectual, cultural, and political significance of different traits of writing, which also specified whether those traits made writing good or bad. Second, literariness came to refer to capital-L Literature; a special domain of imaginative writing separated from political entanglement or other explicit functions, and specifically marked by the traits assigned to good writing. Third, a broad category of the aesthetic as a realm of literate thought removed from specific usefulness or purpose emerged, which gained in significance by this detachment.

In 1688, at the beginning of the period covered by this book, the vast array of literary devices for speaking as, or about, or to, monarchical authority made possible a practically infinite number of shades of subtlety of address. But that subtlety also betokened the ineluctable extent to which that authority controlled the material conditions surrounding the text’s existence. By the time at which this book ends in 1781, those tools were antiquated, dead metaphors. Political authority certainly still directly circumscribed the existence of some texts, but the government, still less the monarch, had little or nothing to do with the success or failure of any given text and its author. The discursive realms of literature and politics were still contiguous, but now distinct. Texts retained the capacity to generate a field of authority the better to secure their success. The guarantor of this authority and its ultimate referent was no longer the monarch but the author.

Between 1688 and 1715, England and then the United Kingdom of Great Britain were wracked by the cataclysms that made this transformation possible. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the changes effected in that twenty-seven-year span. And the period’s changes were wrought by forms of writing imbued with a new power of expressing consensus: in June 1688, the Dutch stadtholder, William of Orange, received a written invitation to ascend the English throne from a group of powerful English nobles, and the succession of George I after Queen Anne in 1714 had been predetermined by an act of Parliament fourteen years earlier. Eventually, the appeals to reason and emotion that had characterized imaginative writing under the rule of dynastic monarchs lost their underlying guarantee of force. Consensual, elective forms of authority were negotiated, and then codified, in genres of writing imbued with constative force.

This is one way of recasting the hoary narrative about the Enlightenment drive to disillusionment: that literary devices like allusion, allegory, and symbolism no longer had a stranglehold on discussions of the polis. They were unnecessary, they had lost their usefulness. Useless non-purposive writing, on the other hand, turned out to be a necessary, and therefore profitable, venture. Of course, no writer could claim to have wholly given up political objectives. But those metamorphoses in turn started an ongoing process by which imaginative writing was reinvented in its own discursive territory. When it came to deciding how that territory ought to be run, and according to what principles, writers and readers of imaginative literature found themselves thrown right back into the very sea out of which they had just crawled. The genres of imaginative writing were to be thought of as a loose federation of kingdoms, alive with courts as active and febrile with connivance and innuendo as any monarchical court. Politics became a metaphor for literature.

The writer who pioneered this transformation was Alexander Pope, the most successful poet of the eighteenth century. He did it, in part, by hybridizing the literary responses of the two opposing sides of the culture war sparked by the deposition of James II. But Pope is far from the only subject of this book, and accounting for the nature and specifics of his success is not its only ambition.

To begin, I recover and reconstitute those two literary cultures, advocating for and against the deposition of James II. These now largely forgotten cultures were each acutely attuned to the threats and promises of the revolution of 1688–89. The first was the field of Whig prose writers, each of whom found in the revolution a prompt for the reform of their respective fields appropriate to the frankly cosmological change that was the advent of William’s rule. These men brought the discussion of private, or personal, pursuits into the public realm. They devised the best way to conduct those pursuits by working backwards from the kingdom they hoped to help build: Whig prose writers used public imperatives to shape private behaviors.

The second literary culture I reassemble is that produced by the political opponents of the first. These writers opposed the reign of William, refused to recognize his legitimacy, and stayed loyal instead to the ousted James II (now plain James Stuart, if you were a Williamite). Instead of molding their private passions on some future politics, these writers, Jacobites, felt that their now-private and officially treasonous passions should instead mold the future public space.

The mechanics of Pope’s achievement in his own time owes deeply to these cultures, and I show how and why this is the case. My larger ambition, however, is to suggest that the nature and mechanics of Pope’s achievements, and those of Samuel Johnson after him, typify the ongoing structural relations among genres of literature. For these reasons among others, this book aspires to be a genealogy of the way in which the historiography of literary aesthetics determines what good and what bad writing are, of what literariness is and has been, and of what literary authority is, with the purpose of offering a case study of how that authority was made, and is still made today.

One principal component of that making occurs through the social and material pathways that texts move through in their lives. I’m mostly concerned with understanding the ways in which systems of literature bear the shifting weights of readers’ expectations. They do so under the label of genres. But throughout this book I keep in mind that genres are themselves part of what I think of as genre systems. The value of this distinction is to attempt to bridge the formalism of genre with a capacious materialism: genres tend to have non-identical readerships, who in turn access those texts by different means and with different degrees of ease. Different genres (religious pamphlets, newspapers, play texts, letters, &c) each have systems adapted to their production, dissemination, consumption, and response.² The genre system, as I deploy the concept, includes not just what a text does (or is called upon to do) but the conditions of existence for its passage through the world. The genre system of Jacobite poetry in manuscript is a covert, peer-to-peer exchange network of texts that mostly were never, and could never have been, printed. The system is supported by the financial resources of its upper echelons, but no money changes hands in the dissemination of the system’s texts. Elective affinities among a group are a necessary precondition for the inclusion of that group in a genre system. I press on this point because the textual cultures in this book have their own totalizing logics, which bind together local concerns (how to read this text) with claims about social organization (how the genre system of this text models a better world).

I am hardly breaking new ground in taking literary authority as my subject.³ I obviously labor in the shadow of John Guillory’s work. But the literary authority I discuss is not his poetic authority (roughly, prior authority either conferred on or claimed by a writer to legitimate speech) nor is it quite cultural capital.⁴ Literary authority is authority over. To pursue the economic metaphor, literary authority in my sense is the mint; cultural capital is the process regulating the distribution of the mint’s products, and in our contemporary sense describes the personal bank accounts where those products are deposited and held. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning transformed literary studies in the early 1980s with their attention to the ways in which writers have assumed the locus standi to proclaim their own greatness.⁵ And my reader might fairly wonder, what makes this period special? How can I say that my chosen subjects differ in kind from the host of authors who had made similar attempts? Virgil, Horace, Spenser, to say nothing of Jonson, Donne and Milton, come to mind. Milton announced that in Paradise Lost he would do Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. But this claim was taken straight from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and the irony of remediating someone else’s claim to originality was entirely the point. Colin Burrow has written eloquently about the long history of imitatio, its relationship with sister arts like translation, and its role in shaping conceptions and uses of literature.⁶ Burrow locates Paradise Lost at the center of a variety of debates about the location of the cross-over point between ‘ancient’ or ‘Classic’ authors . . . and modern authors, who might enjoy a proprietorial right over [the] products of their labour.⁷ While trespassing on texts composed in the same language by contemporaries might attract charges of theft, the imitation of the ancients was seen by eighteenth-century scholars as a way to achieve a particular kind of individual greatness, by contributing to the literary commons.⁸ Nor was Milton doing anything new with this ambivalent claim to contingent independence: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Envoi sends Troilus and Criseyde off to kis the steppes wherever Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius might be found. All this is to say nothing of the many ways that those poets of antiquity found to assert their literary authority. Poets have found less tributary methods, too, to suggest their own greatness: the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf inserted his name into his poems in a runic acrostic;⁹ the sepulchral title page to Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works remains unsurpassed as a piece of visual rhetoric linking literary artifacts to the life and body of their creator. The difference between these examples and this book is circumstantial in origin, but entire in effect. My argument is functionally deictic: though cases like mine have been made before, the contexts surrounding my argument make it qualitatively different. Pope had certain material and structural opportunities that no one had ever had before.

Consider that: (1) pace Thomas Keymer’s skillful adumbration of the mechanisms of state, legal, and extra-legal prior restraint, no state regulator or authority controlled Pope’s access to an audience large enough to be plausibly referred to as a public; (2) that audience was literate, and physically concentrated, enough, infrastructure permitting, to all be able to read the same text on any given day; (3) through the developing postal system, infrastructure existed to permit that simultaneity; (4) that audience had the freedom to buy and read whatever was for sale; and that (5) the opinions of that public could have measurable political and economic consequences.¹⁰ Moreover, these conditions were well-sedimented, discursively and structurally, having been each in effect (in different forms) for up to seventy years by the time Pope began to print his work. Pope’s audience was thus accustomed to expecting that its participation in an economy of cultural production would be a proximate cause of the future of that economy. The public was used to having its literary tastes formed by, but also form, what was considered literature, and it expected to participate in, and sustain, genre systems. Lastly, Pope’s readers expected and sought out discursive heterogeneity, and they were also accustomed to the idea of individual authors (Caxton’s Chaucer, Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden) forming a corpus, with all the associations of that word. No generation of writers in history had ever had this confluence of ease of access, breadth of reach, freedom of speech, and expectation of authorial personhood. Nor had any come upon a readership so prepared for those affordances to be deployed in the propagation of a contrariety of discursive forms and objectives.

These factors came together at a moment of profound political and social tumult, which rendered the relationship between the public and its chosen representatives—whether in speech, broadly understood, or in politics—highly fungible. My claim to offer a generalizable, systemic analysis is thus grounded in the coincidence of particular, granular historical circumstances. Pope came upon a prepared ground. So, while the nature of the endeavor in which I find Pope and Johnson exerting themselves is familiar, even storied, the very specific and particular forms those exertions took merit our particular attention, because the conditions under which they occurred have permitted them to perdure into our critical present.

At the beginning of the period I cover, the matrix of writers’ and readers’ literary expertises is inextricable from the matrices of political affiliations in which those readers and writers lived. By the end of this period, the links binding expertise to political forces had been severed, and in their place links were forged between expertise and market forces. Instead of cultivating their political affiliations, readers showed connoisseurship and taste by purchasing newspapers, pamphlets, books, and prints—whether directly for themselves or as clients of coffee houses and library subscribers. Colin Burrow has charted the process by which writers adjusted a literary marketplace, not least by reconceiving their work, following the lapse in pre-publication licensing in 1695, as property to be owned.¹¹ Some, however, cast about for sets of orienting, differentiating tools that would set them, their productions, and their readers, categorically apart. To seize and retain literary authority required the recalibration of both terms. Literariness was circumscribed so as to exclude expressly purposive writing. Authority gained a new sense; not temporal or spiritual, but aesthetic, the right to prescribe to a public lasting standards of apparently disinterested judgment. Finally, these attributes were made to depend upon, and to underwrite, one another. How was this done? Not least by finessing the category of judgment itself.

Inventing Good and Bad Writing

Pope and Johnson pioneered distinctions between good and bad writing that still obtain today. But we must remember that the difference between good and bad writing is not innate. This book historicizes that relation. It does so by laying bare the complex and interlocking processes by which it was created, consolidated, and weaponized for the purpose of developing, achieving, and retaining literary authority.

Any genealogy of literary authority must be seen in the context of contemporary political struggles. Tooth-and-nail fights for political power in Parliament, coffeehouses, and clubs, conducted through writers and printers, prefigured a corresponding fight for power over the nascent literary public sphere. Political cultures of writing were not necessarily intended to be literary in any contemporary sense, but those cultures offered the types on which literariness was later patterned.

I said above that politics turned out to be the ideal metaphor for literature. Think of the gun-for-hire politician: a hack. As we shall see, literary writing was taught to foreswore (and condemn) purposiveness in imaginative writing, especially political purpose. One animating irony of this book is the fact that literariness came to be through the ostensibly non-purposive reuse of purposive characteristics of political writing; another is that so-called literary writing explicitly opposed itself to the political writing from which those signature gestures were derived.

I claim neither that before this period no writing was perceived as good nor that none was mocked as bad. I argue instead that purposive, explicitly political writing was either effective or ineffective in furthering external, concrete political causes. Conversely, the literary goodness or badness of texts became a markedly textual consideration; the goodness of a poem would rest not on whether it was politically effective, but on its self-constitution and its relations to other poems in the context of the whole field of textual production. The beneficiaries of this switch from effective literature to good literature were the authors themselves, who made literariness almost inseparable from the authority of its responsible agents.

The new definition of literary value and the arrogation of the authority to ascribe it was not, however, quite so simple or so circular. The qualities of judgment that Pope praised in himself and in a select few others changed to fit Pope’s developing needs. Pope was quick to fashion the exercise of taste in writing as a kind of disinterested aesthetic judgment; but how that was best exercised turned out to be happily fungible. Laying claim to disinterested reading required first that Pope redefine his text itself as an aesthetic object, which is in part to say as a non-purposive object. The objective of Pope’s texts was their own contemplation. This led in turn to the selective but ruthless derogation of purposive literature. The purposes served by those texts varied, but the methods Pope used to render them absurd usually did not.

This is why we cannot merely shrug with Colin Burrow that Pope made his own luck.¹² The structural good fortune charted above was not of Pope’s making; otherwise Pope presented as facts his decisions, and the strenuously produced as naturally occurring. To say that Pope made his own luck is, ironically, to accede to his demands to be recognized as great—which Burrow proceeds to do immediately following the line I quote. A revealing counter-case to my suggestion, that Pope found a literary arena gutted of active political referents and turned it to his advantage, might be to examine the role of Kantian disinterest (avant la lettre) in this story. For instance, a literary aesthetics built on Whiggish prescriptions would have prompted readers to disinterested judgment, but disinterested judgment in pursuit of a larger political goal. Without the events I recount, Kant’s suggestion that critique be sundered from politics and sutured onto aesthetics (to paraphrase Foucault’s summary) would have been much less palatable to British audiences, because (one line of argument might run) critique might itself not have survived as a recognizable discursive mode: art and politics would still be the same thing. The people living in that culture might have had to invert Kant’s dictum in Was ist Aufklärung? from Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey! to do not argue, and obey.¹³

The writers I consider in this book worked largely before Kant, but the puzzles surrounding the category of the aesthetic that Kant labored through in the third critique hover, incompletely formulated, throughout this work. A parallel question sits beside it: around whose judgment do these issues revolve? Often, for the writers I discuss, the answer rests in a paradoxical hybrid in which the expertise of the professional writer is central, but the readerly skills of an educated public form a court of final resort. Pope was interested in articulating proto-Kantian standards avant la lettre insofar as this innovation was exigent for his larger purposes. Pope’s use of concepts related to Kant’s work, like sublimity or the genius loci, was not consistent, especially when overlapping with claims to his own exceptionalism. However, Pope was mostly concerned to produce art fitting Kant’s definition of fine art: art that was purposive for itself, and which, although devoid of [definite] purpose, yet furthers the culture of the mental powers.¹⁴ For Pope, the purposelessness Kant stipulates and to which I refer above was a tool he could use to contrast his work with that of other cultures of writing. Pope’s work was purposive for itself not only in the sense that Kant means, in that the work of art possesses and proceeds according to its own logics, but in that the purpose of Pope’s art was to promulgate the notion of the genius of its artist. When Adorno writes that artworks were purposeless because they [have] stepped out of the means-ends relation of empirical reality he forgets that artworks are the agentive productions of their artists.¹⁵ It is not that "collectively fashioned aesthetic forms are once-purposive forms that have become purposeless" but that the appearance of purposelessness was wrought upon artworks for an express end (139, emphasis mine). These aesthetic forms are less vestigial than Adorno supposes, and the internal purposive logics native to them operate, not as dead metaphors, but in a lease of new life.¹⁶

I show Pope’s career as a series of maneuvers undertaken with the intention of transforming the way booksellers, printers, readers, and other writers thought about writing, the better to underscore the adroitness with which Pope compelled his readers to attempt to achieve the right reading, the correct (authorized) exegesis. One method he used was to make the achievement of the right reading grounds for membership in an elevated group. This group was distinguished in several ways—stronger claims to moral authority, cannier readers of history, truer patriotism—but, most of all, members of this group shared the belief that they alone knew what good, and what bad, writing were.

Notes on Genealogy

Mine is incomplete, as all genealogies necessarily are, both in chronology and scope. Quentin Skinner writes that When we trace the genealogy of a concept, we uncover the different ways in which it may have been used in earlier times. We thereby equip ourselves with a means of reflecting critically on how it is currently understood.¹⁷ Genealogies impute a historical logic that histories can, but are not obliged to, offer. My genealogical approach to the construction of present literary-historical categories pulls together political, material, and literary histories.¹⁸ The earlier milieux used as fodder by later writers employed literary strategies homologous to their broader political objectives.¹⁹ This gambit is familiar to students and scholars of historical poetics; however, this project extends the insights of that approach to the etiology of the history of those poetic forms.

I take as signal Foucault’s rejection in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History of the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations.²⁰ Foucault emphasizes that the history of reason is not a teleological journey toward transcendent methods and values, but a history of personal conflicts; and that the genealogist must cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.²¹ The details and accidents I detail do not just accompany this beginning; they make it possible. Pope and Johnson were able to transform the field of literary production and consumption because Pope in particular realized that Jacobite manuscript poetry and Whig nonfiction prose were fundamentally political fields with literary manifestations.²² These political fields were ripe for literary appropriation because, whereas they had dominant political actors, they did not have dominant literary actors. Although the structures of fields are homologous, Pope realized that a single text, or a body of texts, can exist in multiple fields at once, and exploited that multiplicity to create a kind of slippage, so that strategies that did work in one text in one field could do work in another text in a different field.

Though these writers and the cultures they plundered are my immediate objects, this book is offered in the spirit of a case study of how literary authority has been constructed in historically and geographically various literary spheres. My subject in this sense is the way that forms are translated from one genre to the next in the service of the translator’s efforts in an ongoing struggle to determine what genres are for, and therefore to determine what work texts can and cannot do in the world. In this I am following Rachael Scarborough King’s concept of genre as what a text does, rather than an a priori definition of what it is.²³ The constitution of literary authority in different spheres of literary activity varies, of course, in its particulars. However, just as the agon through which authority is wrought produces hierarchical structures, that struggle has a particular form, which I sketch here.

Translated political literary forms can be definitive in the establishment of a new genre, in asserting the canonical centrality of the texts deploying them to that new genre, and the literary authority of the author who has supposedly innovated them. I offer two transhistorical, transgeneric examples here, though very many more could be adduced. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto begins with an enormous helmet crashing down, ex nihilo, into a courtyard. The rest of the text unfolds the consequences of this extraordinary occurrence, a breach of our uniform experience of the course of nature, and suggests that one breach or miraculous event might lead to others.²⁴ The ramifications of the appearance of the helmet at the novel’s outset import into a literary frame a device from purposive literature, in this case the use of hypotheticals to explore the possibility and consequences of radical skepticism. From The Castle of Otranto onward, the inexplicable rupture of the uniform experience of the course of nature has become an increasingly dominant signifier of the genre of gothic fiction. So strongly does the posing of Humean hypothetical questions in this line—how to evaluate the constancy of the natural world, the value of testimony about it, and how to reason about observed changes to it—connote the gothic that such instances have become overdetermined signifiers used as shorthands for the genre as a whole.

A second, rather different instance: Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) borrows extensively from the genre of the anthropologist’s field report.²⁵ The field report turned out to be a formidably powerful vector for conveying kinds of estrangement germane