Reading Swift's Poetry by Daniel Cook, and: Alexander Pope in the Making by Joseph Hone (review)

Abstract

The single-author study enjoys a difficult relationship with literary studies. Since Warton, or Addison, or Dennis, it has been, if not the coin of the realm, at least a gold standard against which that currency is guaranteed. By the same token, the single-author study is redolent of those attitudes toward history and canonicity (both of them ostensibly conservative models) that literary studies have worked so assiduously—and rightly—to displace. The scholar who undertakes a single-author study of a figure from the old canon is on the horns of this dilemma: to justify the study’s focus without invoking politically otiose heuristics.