European University Institute Library

Things that didn't happen, writing, politics and the counterhistorical, 1678-1743, John McTague

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages [257]-274) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Things that didn't happen

bibliography

1089412878

John McTague

Studies in the eighteenth century

writing, politics and the counterhistorical, 1678-1743

James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales born in 1688, was not a commoner's child smuggled into the queen's birthing chamber in a warming pan, but many people said he was. In 1708, the same prince did not quite land in Scotland with a force of 5,000 men in order to claim the Scottish crown, but writers busied themselves with exploring what would have happened if he had succeeded. These fictions had as potent an effect on the political culture of late Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain as many events that really did happen. From the alleged "Popish Plot" of Titus Oates to the South Sea Bubble, John McTague draws on a rich variety of sources - popular, archival and literary - to investigate the propagandic and literary exploitation of three kinds of things that did not occur at this time: failures which inspired "what if" narratives, speculative futures which failed to come to pass and "pure" fictions created and disseminated for political gain. Finally, a ground-breaking reading of the various versions of Pope's Dunciad reveals a work that in its exploration of historic causation and agency and its repurposing of the material of contemporary political and literary culture deploys many of the strategies explored in earlier chapters to present Hanoverian reality as if it were counterhistory. --, Provided by publisher

List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- I: Fabrications. Incorrigibility: The warming pan scandal of 1688-89 -- 'Working in th'immediate power to be': The popish and protestant plots -- II: Failures. Travesties: The assassination and insurrection plots of 1683 -- Contingency and incontinence: The Jacobite invasion of 1708 -- III: Speculations. The indifference of number: The South Sea bubble, 1720-21 -- 'Some convenient order': Mandeville, Berkeley, and the narration of ethical change -- IV: The Dunciads. Living in counterhistory: The Dunciads as Mock-prophecy -- The indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads -- Gravitation, providence, and theories of history in the Dunciads -- Conclusions: Events that didn't happen -- Bibliography -- Index

Writing, politics and the counterhistorical, 1678-1743