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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... literalized one . Narrative serves description , and The Dunciad is a picture of Dulness , a group picture since Dulness is only her massed minions . Augustan poets habitually used narrative to enliven description , from Pope's ...
... literalized metaphors as the basis of Augustan narrative , see Colomb ( 1978 ) . McKeon discusses Pilgrim's Progress as a literalized allegory . 22. The exception is Canto VI , which records Celsus's underworld journey to the shade of ...
... literalized version . No reader will take very seriously the pros- pect that the apothecaries themselves will take up arms , that the pills will become bullets , the pens swords . The shock comes when we rec- ognize the original truth ...
... literalized into a story.24 By reinvigorating the tired language of literary controversy , Pope makes readers recognize what its trite repetitions had overshadowed : that poets hold in their pens the responsibility for the cultural ...
... literalized metaphors is , not accidentally , of the canonical form . As John Sitter reminds us , " For the Augustan humanist the greatness of the epic and the epic hero lay in the fact that the ' one , great , and remarkable action ...
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 | |