Exemplary England

Historical Inquiry and Literary Recompense in Pope, Gray, and Richardson

Sarabeth Grant

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780813949000
• eBook ISBN: 9780813949017
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

What meaning does the past hold for the present? History writing often prioritizes the ethos and actions of the "great men" of the past, those connected to formal expressions of power, as models worthy of imitation. The problem with such exemplars is that they craft a limited view of national identity, drawn from political, economic, religious, and social institutional superstructures. Inherently exclusionary, narratives of exemplary men inadequately represent the complexities of a metropolitan and diverse society.

In Exemplary England, Sarabeth Grant explores three canonical texts of 1740s England that critique the class, geography, and gender assumptions of the exemplar model. Through original readings of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Richardson, she locates practices of constituting history and registering national identity in eighteenth-century England beyond that tradition. Her book argues that these literary texts offer recompense for the national injustices endured by the disenfranchised, charting the development of inward historical consciousness as necessary to civic stability.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: “Such Labor’d Nothings,” Rhetorical Showmen, and the Study of History
• 1 “Another Phoebus, Thy Own Phoebus”: Verse Satire and Class in The Dunciad
• 2 “Their Artless Tale Relate”: Pastoral Elegy and Geography in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
• 3 “She Has Now a Tale to Tell”: The Epistolary Novel and Gender in Clarissa
• Coda: “Building a Monument, or Burying the Dead”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index