The Word

This chapter traces the French and English relationship with the Ottoman Empire and accounts for the introduction of the term “houri” in French in the seventeenth century and English in the eighteenth century. Through surveying sixteenth-century polemics about Islam, seventeenth-century travel writings, and eighteenth-century literature, the chapter argues that French and English writers used the idea of the houri as a source of critique in anti-Islamic polemics and travel writing even while their views of Islam and Islamic empires could be ambivalent. By the eighteenth century, writers also began to employ the term “houri” as a way to describe a model of feminine beauty.

Alexander Pope in the Making

How did Alexander Pope become the greatest poet of the eighteenth century? Drawing on previously neglected texts and overlooked archival materials, Alexander Pope in the Making provides a radical new account of the poet’s early career, from the earliest traces of manuscript circulation to the publication of his collected Works. Joseph Hone illuminates classic poems such as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest by setting them alongside lesser-known texts by Pope and his contemporaries, many of which have never received sustained critical attention before. Pope’s earliest experiments in satire, panegyric, lyric, pastoral, and epic are all explored alongside his translations, publication strategies, and neglected editorial projects. By recovering cultural values shared by Pope and the politically heterodox men and women whose works he read and with whom he collaborated, Hone unearths powerful new interpretive possibilities for some of the eighteenth century’s most celebrated poems. Alexander Pope in the Making mounts a comprehensive challenge to the ‘Scriblerian’ paradigm that has dominated scholarship for the past eighty years. It sheds fresh light on Pope’s early career and reshapes our understanding of the ideological landscape of his era. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

Dr Fossile’s Crocodile: Science and the ‘Oriental Chronotope’ in Eighteenth-Century Literature

This article explores eighteenth-century questions surrounding the spatiotemporal nature of the field we now call ‘science’. Today’s commonplace notion of ‘modern Western science’ assumes conceptual binaries that do not map onto eighteenth-century discourses. The article focuses on two works by the so-called Scriblerians—Three Hours after Marriage (1717), and Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1714, pub. 1741)—which satirize the much-maligned Dr John Woodward and, ostensibly, the philosophical mode he represented. Though these texts are satirical, the article does not posit a clash of cultures. Instead, it examines a set of tropes, shared by numerous authors at various purposes, which inflected science with the narratological space-time of the ancient Orient. This ‘Oriental chronotope’ (in Bakhtinian terms) speaks to the complex space that science occupied in emerging narratives of Western modernity. The Eastern artefacts featured in these works, and their shared themes of dubious reproduction, establish an unlikely affinity with Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), which offers the new sciences as a dialectic between the ancient and modern worlds.