Rereading Pope’s The Dunciad

Authors

  • Su Yong

Abstract

This paper studies the interaction between the prose portion and the verse portion of the variorum edition of Alexander Pope’s The New Dunciad and its indebtedness to the tradition of Menippean satire. Then, it uses Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque and James Frazer’s Saturnalian myth to explain how miseducation leads to corruptions in different domains of culture and eventually the annihilation of civilization in The New Dunciad.

Author Biography

Su Yong

Su Yong received her BA, MA, and Ph.D in English literature from Peking University, China. She is currently an Associate Professor at the English Department, Peking University. Her research interest is in eighteenth-century English literature.

References

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

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Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan, 1963.

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Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1936.

Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. (The Twickenham Edition) Ed. James Sutherland. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

---. Essay on Man. Ed. E. E. Morris. London: Macmillan, 1924. Print.

---. Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism. The Twickenham Edition. Ed. Edward Audra and Aubrey Williams. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Rawson, Claude. Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper. London & Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Rogers, Pat. “Nameless Names: Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity.” New Literary History 33 (2002): 233-245.

Rogers, Shef. “Pope, Publishing, and Popular Interpretation of The Dunciad Variorum.” Philological Quarterly 74: 3 (Summer 1995): 279-291.

Williams, Aubrey L. Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning. London: Methuen, 1955.

Published

2013-01-01

Issue

No. 1 (2013): Thoughts 2013

Section

Articles

License

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