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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... story of that genre . It is not a story of influence , although one strand follows the many , largely unexplored ties between Garth and his young friend Al- exander Pope . Nor is it a genetic story , although it will trace the well ...
... story has its attractions . But as I will show , that and all the stories about these poems are moti- vated by their undeniable , difficult , massive particularity . Not the first to raise the issue of particulars in the mock - epic , I ...
... story , which takes The Rape of the Lock as the generic model and The Dunciad as a divergent , mutant form , the generic model was in fact es- tablished by The Dispensary , was diverged from ( though only slightly ) by The Rape of the ...
... stories of tradition and cultural inheritance , the poems are dominated by legacies of all sorts , chiefly the legacy memorialized in the epic . And yet no high Augustan poems are so modern — so tied to contemporary events , so full of ...
... story of a natural aristocracy of poetry . And yet the establishment served by these stories was finally just the establishment of the professional , its ideology a product of an economic organization defined increasingly in terms of ...
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 | |