Abigail Williams

In a radio sketch from John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, a secondary-school teacher diplomatically attempts to negotiate the dubious interpretations of Macbeth offered by his students: ‘That’s an interesting reading …That’s a really interesting answer’ – and, at the suggestion that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are being sarcastic in their discussion of killing Duncan: ‘Well, I could not be more interested in that answer.’ Only once the lesson switches to maths is the teacher finally free to speak his mind:

‘No that’s wrong, that’s the wrong answer, and I will tell you the right answer, which I know and you should learn! God that felt good!’

As Abigail Williams argues in her new study of early 18th-century literature, despite the ‘death of the author’ and the apparent multiplication of meanings offered by postmodern literary theory, practices of pedagogy still seek – however indirectly and Socratically, like Finnemore’s teacher – to be expert guides that lead readers to the ‘right answer’. In such a context, Williams’ dedication of this book to her students at St Peter’s College, Oxford might seem as double-edged as Alexander Pope’s dedication of The Rape of the Lock to Arabella Fermor (the model for his heroine ‘Belinda’).

The literature of this period, with its pages full of blanked-out names and dense webs of political and topical reference, can make it a particular challenge for students who don’t know their occasional conformists from their Patriot Whigs. Many modern editions assume an ideal 18th-century reader who would have readily picked up on all these references and attempt to replicate this knowledge base through extensive annotations: the Longman edition of Pope’s Dunciad, for example, often drowns a single line of text in a full page of explanatory notes (though the more baffling of these, as Williams explains, were originally supplied by Pope himself in a multi-layered parody of contemporary scholarship).

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Natasha Simonova is a writer and researcher of 18th-century literature based in London.… (lisätietoja)