Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry

About the Author\nDavid Hopkins, Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol,Tom Mason, Research Fellow, University of Bristol\nDavid Hopkins read Classics and English at Cambridge and wrote his PhD (on 'Dryden's Translations from Ovid') at the University of Leicester. He taught in the English Department at the University of Bristol from 1977, eventually becoming a Professor (now Emeritus) of English Literature. Most of his published work has been concerned with English poetry and literary criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with the relations between English poetry and the Greek and Roman Classics. He is the author of books on Milton and Dryden, and co-editor of Dryden's poems and of the five-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature.\nTom Mason read English at Oxford and wrote his PhD at Cambridge. He taught in the English Department at the University of Bristol from 1978. Most of his published work has been concerned with English poetry and literary criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.\nThis volume is a study of how the poetry of Chaucer continued to give pleasure in the eighteenth century despite the immense linguistic, literary, and cultural shifts that had occurred in the intervening centuries. It explores translations and imitations of Chaucer's work by Dryden, Pope, and other poets (including Samuel Cobb, John Dart, Christopher Smart, Jane Brereton, William Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt) from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, as well as investigating the beginnings of modern Chaucer editing and biography.\nIt pays particular attention to critical responses to Chaucer by Dryden and the brothers Warton, and includes a chapter on the oblique presence of Chaucer in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. It explores the ways in which Chaucer's poetry (including several works now known not to be by him) was described, refashioned, reimagined, and understood several centuries after its initial appearance. It also documents the way that views of Chaucer's own character were inferred from his work. The book combines detailed discussion of particular critical and poetic texts, many of them unfamiliar to modern readers, with larger suggestions about the ways in which poetry of the past is received in the future.