Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317062973
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by : Roger D. Lund

Download or read book Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England written by Roger D. Lund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.

The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660-1715

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1783275170
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (832 download)

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Book Synopsis The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660-1715 by : Alex W. Barber

Download or read book The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660-1715 written by Alex W. Barber and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the fascinating interplay between communication, politics and religion in early modern England suggesting a new framework for the politics of print culture. This book challenges the idea that the loss of pre-publication licensing in 1695 unleashed a free press on an unsuspecting political class, setting England on the path to modernity. England did not move from a position of complete control of the press to one of complete freedom. Instead, it moved from pre-publication censorship to post-publication restraint. Political and religious authorities and their agents continued to shape and manipulate information. Authors, printers, publishers and book agents were continually harassed. The book trade reacted by practicing self-censorship. At times of political calm, government and the book trade colluded in a policy of policing rather than punishment. The Restraint of the Press in England problematizes the notion of the birth of modernity, a moment claimed by many prominent scholars to have taken place at the transition from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. What emerges from this study is not a steady move to liberalism, democracy or modernity. Rather, after 1695, England was a religious and politically fractured society, in which ideas of the sovereignty of the people and the power of public opinion were being established and argued about.

Uncivil Mirth

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691241775
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Uncivil Mirth by : Ross Carroll

Download or read book Uncivil Mirth written by Ross Carroll and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. Ross Carroll brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris. Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108874819
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century by : James Bryant Reeves

Download or read book Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century written by James Bryant Reeves and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the Age of Enlightenment. He demonstrates that hostility to unbelief likewise produced various forms of religious ecumenicalism, with authors depicting non-Christian theists from around Britain's emerging empire as sympathetic allies in the fight against irreligion. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain for the first time, revealing a relationship between atheism and secularization far more fraught than has previously been supposed.

The Decline of Magic

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300243588
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The Decline of Magic by : Michael Hunter

Download or read book The Decline of Magic written by Michael Hunter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history that overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain--named a Best Book of 2020 by the Financial Times In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Credit for this great change is usually given to science - and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. But is this justified? Michael Hunter argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191043702
Total Pages : 816 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire by : Paddy Bullard

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire written by Paddy Bullard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.

The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107146275
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760 by : Darryl P. Domingo

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760 written by Darryl P. Domingo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how literature of the early eighteenth century represented a newly fashionable life of amusement and diversion. Chapters explore a range of diversionary preoccupations and argue that the devices of digressive wit adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in eighteenth-century culture.

Secular Chains

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019107831X
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Chains by : Philip Connell

Download or read book Secular Chains written by Philip Connell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process, and throws new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688, and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope, and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

Eighteenth-century Stoic Poetics

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004517308
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Eighteenth-century Stoic Poetics by : Alexandra Bacalu

Download or read book Eighteenth-century Stoic Poetics written by Alexandra Bacalu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside, exploring the two authors' debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises, early modern conceptions of the care of the self, and ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and its poetic regulation.

Ridiculous Critics

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Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611486157
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis Ridiculous Critics by : Philip Smallwood

Download or read book Ridiculous Critics written by Philip Smallwood and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ridiculous Critics offers an outline of eighteenth-century literary criticism that undermines its stuffy reputation. This history highlights the contempt, jocularity, irony, and buffoonery that also make up its critical spirit, with passages from critics, poets, novelists, and literary commentators celebrated and obscure.

Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama, 1538–1681

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Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9198376888
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (983 download)

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Book Synopsis Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama, 1538–1681 by : Eric Pudney

Download or read book Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama, 1538–1681 written by Eric Pudney and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Warburg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for an outstanding work of literary history This is a study of the representation of witches in early modern English drama, organised around the themes of scepticism and belief. It covers the entire early modern period, including the Restoration, and pays particular attention to three plays in which witchcraft is central: The Witch of Edmonton (1621), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and The Lancashire Witches (1681). Always a controversial issue, witchcraft has traditionally been seen in terms of a debate between ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. This book argues instead that, while the concepts of scepticism and belief are central to an understanding of early modern witchcraft, they are more fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the witchcraft debate, but as rhetorical tools used by both sides.

Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009268759
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment by : Michael Hunter

Download or read book Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment written by Michael Hunter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated.

Poetics of the Pillory

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191070920
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of the Pillory by : Thomas Keymer

Download or read book Poetics of the Pillory written by Thomas Keymer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment—the pillory—that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity—ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony—may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003845266
Total Pages : 905 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English by : Sarah Eron

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English written by Sarah Eron and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter

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Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442622253
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (426 download)

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Book Synopsis Mind, Body, Motion, Matter by : Mary Helen McMurran

Download or read book Mind, Body, Motion, Matter written by Mary Helen McMurran and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

Anticlerical legacies

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Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526168812
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Anticlerical legacies by : Elad Carmel

Download or read book Anticlerical legacies written by Elad Carmel and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anticlerical legacies is the first comprehensive study of the reception of Thomas Hobbes’s ideas by the English deists and freethinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the most important English philosophers of all time, Hobbes’s theories have had an enduring impact on modern political and religious thought. This book offers a new perspective on the afterlife of Hobbes’s philosophy, focusing on the readers who were most sympathetic to his critical and radical ideas in the decades following his death. It investigates how Hobbes’s ideas shaped the English anticlerical campaign that peaked in the early eighteenth century and that was essential for the emergence of the early Enlightenment. The book shows that a large number of writers – Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and many others – were more Hobbesian than has ever been appreciated. Not only did they engage consistently with Hobbes’s ideas, they even invoked his authority at a time when doing so was highly unpopular. Most fundamentally, they carried on Hobbes’s war against the kingdom of darkness and used various Hobbesian weapons for their own war against priestcraft. Analysing the ways in which the deists and freethinkers developed their nuanced theories and conducted their heated dialogues with the orthodoxy, they emerge from this study as sophisticated and valuable theorists in their own right. The case of Hobbes and his successors demonstrates that anticlericalism was a key component of a much larger programme whose primary aim was to secure civil harmony, peace, and stability.

A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"

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Author :
Publisher : Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN 13 : 1410358887
Total Pages : 17 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense" by : Gale, Cengage Learning

Download or read book A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense" written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: