More Solid Learning
New Perspectives on Alexander Pope's Dunciad
Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Published on 1. August 2000
Book
Hardback
254 pages
978-1-61148-119-8 (ISBN)
Description
Until this book, there has not been a collection that focuses exclusively on Pope's satiric masterpiece. The seeming resistance to fully engage the poem belies its centrality within eighteenth-century culture. Like Gulliver's Travels or The Beggar's Opera, the poem's hybridity actually changes and imrpoves upon the forms it parodically controls. But unlike those texts, it proves difficult to teach, despite multiple points of entry. The essays in this volume attempt to teach the poem from a variety of perspectives and, in doing so, to illuminate its role as literary history, cultural artifact, and material object. They suggest the ways the poem interacts with and influences the dynamic milieu from which it springs. George Rousseau once remarked that The Dunciad had yet to be mined as either material or as a material object. His essay in this volume begins to redress that state of affairs by exploring the relationship between Pope's psychosexual development and his antipathy to opera. Approaching this under-studied Popeian aversion from a second perspective, Valerie Rumbold explores the theme of opera within The Dunciad in Four Books to reveal internal tensions and complicated examples of shared authorship in the poem. Her essay illustrates the challenge historical analysis poses to the tradition of reading the poem as an expression of absolutes. Laura J. Rosenthal's and Eric V. Chandler's essays each examine, in different terms, the construction in the 1740s. Similarly, Linda Zionkowski discusses Pope's centrality in the debates over the often-gendered nature of literary labor, and his repudiation in Book IV of The Dunciad of the concepts of masculine conduct from which he was excluded. Catherine Ingrassia looks at the reconstruction of Pope's body and persona (which both suffer from a compromised masculinity) in Edmund Curll's pamphlets responding to the 1728 Dunciad. Thomas Jemielity reads The Dunciad as "mock-apocalypse" and suggest how such a reading complicates the
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cranbury
United States
Publishing group
Associated University Presses
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 168 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
553 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61148-119-8 (9781611481198)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Catherine Ingrassia is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is the author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit. Claudia N. Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, and is the author of Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers.