Product details
- ISBN 9781041116400
- Weight: 420g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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First published in 1971, Reinterpretations focusses upon a group of closely related major poems—L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Milton’s companion pieces, and Lycidas, Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, and Johnson’s London. The critical and interpretive light which Professor Hardy brings to bear on these works constitutes a considerable reinterpretation which informs our understanding of seventeenth and eighteenth century English poetry.
In the individual essays, Professor Hardy suggests that the real theme of Milton’s companion poems has gone unrecognized, and that not only has Lycidas a clear structural unity, but the final, effective statement of its theme depends on a realization of how this unity is achieved. He argues that current interpretations of Pope’s beautiful heroine are generally too limiting, especially in ignoring the wit of the Rape’s overall conception, and that the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, far from being a mere collection of brilliant passages, has a structure skilfully articulated in terms of its individual theme. Finally, he demonstrates that Johnson’s reworking of Juvenal’s famous third satire has, as its central structural metaphor implies, an original and essentially political theme. This book will be a beneficial read for students and researchers of English literature.
John Hardy, an Australian Rhodes Scholar, completed his Oxford doctorate as a “prize fellow” of Magdalen College, and after teaching for a year at the University of Toronto, returned to Australia as Professor of English at the University of New England and Australian National University, before becoming a Foundation Dean at Bond University, from which he retired as Emeritus Professor. During the 1980s he was Fellow and Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and director of its project for the Australian Bicentenary. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including major books of literary criticism on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dr Johnson and Jane Austen. Reinterpretations, his book of essays, received very favourable notice in British Book News.
