More Solid Learning New Perspectives on Alexander Pope's Dunciad

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 poem's satiric nature. Claudia N. Thomas discusses the poem's Rabelaisian qualities in terms that go beyond Stalleybrass and Whites' or Bakhtin's use of the epithet; rather, she is concerned with Pope's adaptation of the Renaissance satirist's 'Rabelaisian' imagery and purposes. The appearance of a collection on The Dunciad nearly a decade after Pope's tercentenary suggests the poem's continued vitality and, more important, centrality to understanding the culture of eighteenth-century England: it remains a touchstone that captures the tenor of the period it helped create.