Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-EpicPenn State Press, 1. sept 1992 - 256 pages Designs on Truth provides a reinterpretation of Augustan poetry, not as works to be defended before the court of Matthew Arnold and the Romantic tradition but as works that examine the rich relationships among text, culture, and world. In Designs on Truth, Gregory Colomb identifies the characteristics of the mock-epic and argues that the form had developed formal expectations. In making this argument, he explains the intentions of the writers of mock-epics, and expands our conception of the interest and significance of such poems. By demonstrating how these poems are supported by the genre's poetics, he brings out ways these poems differ from other &"Augustan&" poems such as the Horatian epistles that are often discussed with them. Designs on Truth puts into question the distinction between history and poetry in the mock-epic, examining it at three levels of poetic structure: fable (global narrative structure), and portraits (characterological narrative structure). Focusing chiefly on the mock-epic's representations in terms of class and &"kind,&" this study returns historical particulars to the central role that the poets had always given them and seeks to understand how they are made poetic. Designs on Truth shows how the poems themselves subvert any easy distinction between historical and poetic particulars. This often philosophical genre is itself a reconsideration of the role of reference (fact) and judgment (value) in representation. This study shows how representation and judgment work in the mock-epic, and how together they stand at the heart of the dominant Augustan poetic. Colomb also provides new readings of the mock-epic, including the first comprehensive reading of The Dispensary since the eighteenth century. |
From inside the book
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... fable , as may be most suitable to the moral ; after this he begins to think of the persons whom be is to employ in carrying on his design ; and gives them the manners which are most proper to their several characters . The thoughts and ...
... fable " more indebted to panegyric than to epic.2 Questions of succession and , more generally , of establishment had come to domi- nate panegyric and its kin , driven as they were by the tumult of seventeenth - century politics . By ...
... fable . Augustan critics knew that the fable was the most important fea- ture , its " soul " the relation between narrative form and didactic end . That relation is also key to the mock - epic , as Augustan narrative forms moved from ...
... fable , which characteristically mixed aspects of formal , structural design with as- pects of didactic , intentional design . For the premier neoclassical critic of the epic , Rene Le Bossu , the fable was " un discours invente pour ...
... Fable ; a Fable compounded of Truth and Fic- tion ; the Truth disguis'd and convey'd by the Fiction . ( 1.57 ) Dennis , however , is characteristically willing to push the logic of his po- sition , collapsing the epic fable into ...
Contents
Prologue | 33 |
Naming Names | 35 |
Dullness by Its Proper Name 3 | 59 |
Urban Gravitation | 79 |
Ranging Afield | 95 |
Prologue | 119 |
From Caricature to Portraiture 6 | 129 |
Dishonourable Confederacies | 145 |
A Taxonomy of Dunces 8 | 163 |
A Succession of Monarchs 9 | 183 |
Epilogue | 207 |
209 | |
219 | |