Britannia's Issue

"Howard D. Weinbrot's Britannia's Issue chronicles the developing confidence in British letters and values from the 1660s to the 1760s. His range of evidence includes biblical, classical, economic, English, French, and Scottish sources that help to show eighteenth-century Britain's movement away from classical and towards native values and models in an expanding nation. He demonstrates that Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie reflects nationalist aesthetics, that Pope's Rape of the Lock affirms domestic harmony while rejecting Homeric violence, and that Windsor Forest sings unRoman peaceful expansion through trade. Thereafter, he makes plain how Dryden, Gray, and Collins naturalize the Greek ode, how philosemitism and its limits help to illuminate Handel's Israel in Egypt and Smart's Song to David, and how post-Culloden "Celtomania" influenced Macpherson's Ossian poems. These and other works belong to a united kingdom that respects the classics but regards them only as one part of Britain's literary and genetic synthesis. This learned and lucidly written book offers revisionist but historically grounded interpretations of important works within complex and varied eighteenth-century British cultures."--Jacket.