Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is one of the greatest poets in European literature, comparable to the likes of likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats and Wordsworth. He is not easy to read though: his poetry uses dense literary and contemporary contextual allusions. This is why a book that gets the readers to the meaning of his poetry as painlessly as possible is so important. This volume features the complete text of Pope's most significant poem, The Dunciad. The first-rate annotations that accompany this edition of the poem provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to the contemporary reader.

The Dunciad in Four Books of 1743 was the culmination of the series of Dunciads which Alexander Pope produced over the last decade and a half of his life. It comprises not only a poem, but also a mass of authorial annotation and appendices, and this authoritative edition is the only one available which gives all the verse and the prose in a clearly laid-out form, with a full modern commentary. Accessibly presented on the same page as Pope’s text are explanatory notes, written in a style adapted to the needs of undergraduate readers, but still comprehensive enough to address the interests of scholars. The many books and pamphlets to which Pope refers have been examined in detail, and the commentary takes advantage of the fifty years’ scholarship on literary, bibliographical, cultural and political aspects of the period which has accumulated since James Sutherland’s The Dunciad, volume five of the Twickenham Edition. A substantial introduction offers a stimulating and helpful approach to the work, and the bibliography includes extensive suggestions for further reading.

In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.