The battle of the books: history and literature in the Augustan Age

Joseph M. Levine provides a witty and erudite account of one of most celebrated chapters in English cultural history, acrimonious quarrel between and which Jonathan Swift dubbed the Battle of Books. The dispute that amused and excited English world of letters from 1690 until 1730s was, Levine shows, an installment in long-standing debate about relationship of classical learning to life. Levine argues that debate was fundamentally a quarrel about rival claims of history and literature concerning proper way to understand authors of past. He skillfully examines how both sides wrote their own brands of history: The moderns, led by Richard Bentley, proposed that modern inventions of classical scholarship and archaeology gave them a superior insight into past; ancients, marshaled by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, held out for a more direct imitation of antiquity and opposed new scholarship with all force of their satire and invective. Levine demonstrates that ancients and moderns influenced each other in powerful ways, and had much more in common than they knew. Chronicling a critical episode in development of modem scholarship, The Battle of Books illuminates roots of present-day controversies about role of classics in curriculum and place of humanities in education.