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David Nokes's detailed and extensive research has unearthed several new discoveries, including hitherto unpublished letters, and possible attributions. Presenting Gay as a complex character, torn between the hopes of court preferment and the assertion of literary independence, this book is at once a lively and readable biography for the non-specialist, as well as a comprehensive and scholarly study. Perhaps best known for The Beggar's Opera , John Gay is here revealed to be a contradictory figure whose life defies strict generic categories. Often cast as a neglected genius, dependent upon others, Gay in fact left a healthy estate after his death. Depicted both as childlike innocent and rakish ladies' man by his friends, the same writer produced Polly , the most successful and subversive theatrical satire of his generation, which was banned from the stage. 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World experts on Madoc, the great 18th-century poet, are assembling for a celebratory conference in Wales; the setting is an isolated building run by a religious sect advocating purity of mind. It s a gathering populated by shady, repressed, and unscrupulous academics, whose only means of salvation appears to be through the discovery of an unknown page from the works of a dead writer; but when a new canto from Madoc s masterpiece appears out of the blue and is presented at the conference, the heat is on. The result can only be literary disaster. In tones reminiscent of Swift and Pope, this piercing black comedy adds a new page to the long British tradition of social satire. 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