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
Results 1-5 of 32
... speak of a mock - epic fable at all . By all accounts , the epic fable is general and fictional , its theme the destiny of an entire community . Its action " must be General Action ; something in which all might be equally concern'd ...
... speak with the foreknowledge and wisdom of an Anchises . 1n that per- spective . Pope adopts the stance that was Dryden's and Garth's before him , in many ways the stance of the Augustan satirist . He is the quick- sighted , sharp ...
... speak more to our reading of the work and its didactic aims than to its poetic structure — which is all well and good unless we forget that there is no direct route from statements about didactic or thematic force to statements about ...
... speaking things in verse which are beyond the severity of prose " : " This , as to what re- gards the thought or imagination of a poet , consists in fiction : but then those thoughts must be expressed ; and here arise two other branches ...
... speak of a thing and its true Idea , as when low and mean expressions are used to represent the greatest Events , as in Scarron's Virgil - Travesty , or great and lofty terms to describe common things , as in Boileau's Lutrin , which ...
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 | |