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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... Figures of the City ix xi xxi xxiii 1 Prologue 2 Naming Names 3 " Dullness by Its Proper Name " 4 Urban Gravitation 33 35 59 79 5 Ranging Afield 95 Part II : The Figure in the Portrait Prologue 119 6 From Caricature to Portraiture 129 7 ...
... figures ) as parts of an intricate web connecting the social facts of persons and places with the " prosaic " par- ticulars of history . Doing so , it shows how the poems themselves sub- vert any easy distinction between history and ...
... figures about and for whom the poem was written had been pushed off center stage to be replaced by metaphors and other honorific terms of modernist criticism . 1 In the last few years , something like this complaint has begun to appear ...
... figure . " Its methods were principally tropolog- ical , sublimating the cruel and particular pleasures of the ... figures and their haunts held center stage in these studies , the studies themselves avoided poetics and were cast ...
... figures are repre- sented as a point of focus in a field of view , a configuration that mimics an emergent Newtonian cosmology , where a universe of causal mecha- nism is ordered by a first cause that gives it " design , " at once ...
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 | |