Background
Howard Erskine-Hill was born on June 19, 1936, in Wakefield, the United Kingdom, to Henry and Hannah Lillian (Poppleton) Erskine-Hill.
University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Howard Erskine-Hill studied English with philosophy at the University of Nottingham and upon graduating in 1957, wrote his PhD thesis (also at Nottingham) on Alexander Pope.
(This new critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels prov...)
This new critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels provides a fresh and impartial account of this world-famous satire. It presents Swift's work in its historical and literary context, and explores its allusions, its four-part structure, its narrative strategy, and its prose style. A final chapter sketches the fictional aftermath of the Travels from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and there is a guide to further reading.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521329345/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(This is a major study of the relation between poetry and ...)
This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politics in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, focusing in particular on the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden. Taking issue with the traditional concept of the political poem and with recent New Historicist criticism, Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absolom and Architophel and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple references.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198117310/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(This is a major study of the relation between poetry and ...)
This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politics from the 1688 Revolution to the early years of the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the works of Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth. Building on his argument in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (also available from OUP), Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of political allegory and overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple references.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198121776/?tag=2022091-20
1997
Howard Erskine-Hill was born on June 19, 1936, in Wakefield, the United Kingdom, to Henry and Hannah Lillian (Poppleton) Erskine-Hill.
Howard Erskine-Hill studied English with philosophy at the University of Nottingham and upon graduating in 1957, wrote his Ph.D. thesis (also at Nottingham) on Alexander Pope.
From 1960 to 1969 Erskine-Hill taught at Swansea University, from 1969 until 1980 he was University Lecturer in English at Jesus College, Cambridge and from 1980 he was Reader in Literary History at Pembroke College, Cambridge. From 1994 until his retirement in 2003 he was a Professor of Literary History. He was notable for his work on the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope.
His The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example, and the Poetic Response is a biographic look at the people of Pope’s era who provide the social background for Pope’s work. Pat Rogers wrote in the Spectator that Erskine-Hill’s book “is the product of a long and searching interest in Pope and his age. It could only have been written by someone intensely at home with Pope’s world. The work is replete with facts, ideas, quotations; it covers Hanoverian institutions, Augustan attitudes, Palladian aesthetics, capitalist operations, charitable purposes. Beyond all this, the author has an excellent ear for the true voice of poetry and a sharp eye for the figures in Pope’s imaginative carpet.” The book consists of eighty percent biographical information about what Rogers termed “four good men and two baddies.” In the former group are John Kyrle (1637-1724), Pope’s “Man of Ross;” John Caryll (1667-1736), landowner and friend of Pope; Lord William Digby (1662-1732); and Ralph Allen (1693-1764), philanthropist and postal reformer. “Baddies” include Peter Walter (1664- 1746), landowner and investor, and Sir John Blunt (1667-1733) of the South Sea Company. The remaining twenty percent of the book relates the lives of these men to Pope’s later satirical and socially conscious poetry. A Choice reviewer called the volume “generally well written and researched.”
Erskine-Hill edited, with Anne Smith, The Art of Alexander Pope. The eleven essays begin with David Morris’s examination of “An Essay on Criticism.” Other contributors and their subject works include Pat Rogers (“Windsor Forest”), Simon Varey (“An Essay on Man”), J. Philip Brockbank (“Dunciad”), James Anderson Winn (“Eloisa”), and Frank Stack (“Epistle to Bolingbroke”). “The book is designed to hone our sensibilities rather than to initiate large new perspectives,” noted a Choice reviewer. R. Quintana wrote in Modem Language Review that the collection “stands as a fitting tribute to Pope’s genius and as an inducement which ought to prove irresistible to enter the world that Pope brought into being through his language and his controlling vision.”
In The Augustan Idea in English Literature Erskine-Hill considers the positive and negative influences of Caesar Augustus from the period of the Church Fathers to the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, on through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in England. He examines the literature of Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, and Pope. A Choice reviewer noted that Erskine-Hill “cites saints and satirists; epic, lyric, and panegyric poets; playwrights, masque-makers; coin collectors and architects. His scholarship is impressive.” John M. Aden wrote in Sewanee Review that Erskine-Hill acknowledges “the presence in the period of the Tacitean view of Augustus, but he demonstrates beyond any cavil the primacy of the view of Augustus as enlightened princeps, rex pacificus, pontifex, and patron of the arts. He argues just as effectively that Virgil, Horace, et al. were not toadies to a despot but at once sincere admirers of the emperor and quite their own men.” “The book is not just a catalog of opinions, cleverly selected and described,” said Niall Rudd in London Review of Books. “It also contains analyses of several cardinal texts... This combination of literary criticism and historical narrative presents many new insights and is bound to stimulate further thought.”
Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War was edited by Erskine-Hill and Graham Storey. In a History Today review William Lamont commented, “The historical section has a rather second-hand feel to it, although the editors draw conscientiously enough upon the findings of their (mainly Cambridge) historical colleagues.” J. A. Downie wrote in Modem Language Review that “extracts from the Putney Debates offer signal insight into political ideas during the Civil War period but, as a supposedly accurate transcript of what was spoken by a number of important revolutionaries, the manuscript can scarcely be called literary prose.” Downie called the introduction “admirable,” but noted that only three pages are devoted to style, while over twenty-nine address history, political thought, and biography. Downie concluded that the authors have provided “a body of revolutionary prose accessible in textbook form.”
Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden includes an examination of Shakespeare’s early history plays, Milton, and Dryden’s Don Sabastian. “The author makes a good case for the relationships between literature and politics,” wrote J. Wilkinson in Choice. Erskine-Hill’s sequel to Poetry and the Realm of Politics is Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth. In seven chapters Erskine-Hill explores the ways in which Dryden. Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth express their political viewpoints. Times Literary Supplement reviewer Matthew Reynolds said that “it is the discussion of Wordsworth which is the most interesting and most passionately argued. Here, Erskine-Hill disagrees with critics who would, on the one hand, prolong a ‘Jacobin Wordsworth’ into the period of his most famous poems, or, on the other, crow over a supposed apostasy; instead, he proposes that Wordsworth ‘remained faithful to his values, while recognizing that those values had in fact been betrayed by the destructive political program of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.’” “As always, Erskine-Hill is at his best in casting new light on long-familiar texts,” wrote M. W. Gelber in Choice.
(This is a major study of the relation between poetry and ...)
1997(This is a major study of the relation between poetry and ...)
1996(This new critical introduction to Gulliver's Travels prov...)
1993Abandoning the atheism of his student days, Erskine-Hill became a member of the Church of England. In 1994, after the Church of England decided to ordain women, he converted to the Roman Catholic Church.
Erskine-Hill's political views were originally left-wing but he moved to the right whilst at Cambridge and towards the end of his life his Euroscepticism caused him to support the UK Independence Party. Throughout his life, he was a supporter of Amnesty International.
He could be an intimidating admissions interviewer. One student who boasted about his knowledge of Pope was, in his own words, “skewered and toasted like a marshmallow”; another was pulled up for winging a discussion of Gulliver’s Travels having only read the famous bits. Yet many of these students were grateful for Erskine-Hill’s stringency and grew protectively fond of him.