The Sot-Weed Factor

Description

Ebenezer Cooke, an inexperienced English poet, receives the grand title of Maryland’s poet laureate and a commission to celebrate the colony in verse. His journey from London to late-seventeenth-century Maryland instead carries him through pursuit, mistaken identities, peril at sea, sexual temptation, and a society far less noble than his assignment requires. Determined to preserve his innocence, Cooke repeatedly misreads both danger and desire, while each humiliation pushes his intended epic toward satire. The novel mirrors the sprawling fiction of the eighteenth century: episodes open into digressions, embedded tales, historical disputes, and comic reversals. Barth uses Cooke’s battered idealism to examine colonial mythology, authorship, identity, and the unstable boundary between historical record and extravagant invention.

Themes