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Article: Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- April 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay. By John Richardson. (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 2) London and New York: Routledge. 2004. xi+187 pp. 58 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-415-31286-8.
When patriotic Britons sang in the 1740s that they never would be slaves, they were thinking less of Africans working on plantations than of subservience to a despotic France. John Richardson begins his study by outlining the several literal and metaphorical senses of the word 'slave', including the one most familiar from Pope's usage: a political lackey, a corrupt, abject tool of power. Richardson argues that the Treaty of Utrecht, and its adjunct ...