Leslie Stephen

Literary Criticism, Volume 3: Edited by S. T. Joshi Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen became one of the leading commentators on eighteenth-century literature and thought, and the essays in this volume display has mastery of both the prose and poetic writing of the period and the intellectual currents that shaped much of its literary output. Alexander Pope is the subject of two trenchant articles focusing on the moral and religious perspectives found in his poetry. Later poets such as Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and George Crabbe also come in for sensitive analysis. Among prose writers, Stephen recognizes Samuel Johnson as the preeminent figure of the era, even if his actual literary contributions are often less than stellar. Such contrasting figures as the elegant Lord Chesterfield, the religious polemicist William Warburton, and the noble antiquarian Horace Walpole are studied, as is the novelist Laurence Sterne. In the two final papers in the volume, the philosopher William Godwin and his son-in-law, the transcendent poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, are seen as setting the stage of the Romantic movement that would follow.