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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... relation to epic , but this is above all a genre made for and by early modern England . This story is not a simple one , for it is first and foremost a story of details , of what Augustans called " particulars . " It demands a level and ...
... relation of the mock - epic is chiefly description , depiction . It centers on a form of depiction — partly ... relations . These figures are repre- sented as a point of focus in a field of view , a configuration that mimics an ...
... relation to law — because it presumes to remedy the fail- ings of the law and because it is so concerned with questions of lawful establishment . Each poem's particular concern with electoral politics , literary politics , medical ...
... relations . Unable to deny the force of self- interest , the poets represented it conjoined in the narrative with inev- itable and reprehensible consequences — for civilization and the state . But that tie is one of many , not only to ...
... relation is also key to the mock - epic , as Augustan narrative forms moved from epic's preceptual fables to , on ... relationship between particularity in satire and the emergent nove1 . But if , as Lukacs notes , " the epic ...
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 | |