Browsing by Subject "Alexander Pope"

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Pope’s double mistress : Oriental philosophy and the Scriblerian dialectic
(2012-08) Reilly, Matthew Francis; Bertelsen, Lance; Baker, Samuel; Moore, Lisa; Wojciehowski, Hannah; Ingrassia, Catherine
My dissertation, “Pope’s Double Mistress: Oriental Philosophy and the Scriblerian Dialectic,” addresses the aesthetic form and literary history of an eighteenth-century genre known as Scriblerian satire. The study recovers a hitherto unacknowledged technique of Orientalist imitation crafted by Alexander Pope and featured in the “Double Mistress” episode in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). By uncovering Pope’s esoteric Scriblerian design, we gain a clearer understanding of his archive and reception into the literary canon. My study documents the surprising impact of Pope’s Scriblerian Orientalism on British literary history, tracing its influence over a series of controversies surrounding the posthumous suppressions and revelations of his Double Mistress episode.
The fall of the house of fame : text, immortality, and the ancient-modern controversy
(2022-12-02) Hemstreet, Jennifer, 1983-; Bertelsen, Lance; Rumrich, John; Hedrick, Elizabeth; Beutner, Katharine
This dissertation conducts a study of the reception history of classical Greco-Roman models of literary immortality and examines their declining rhetorical power during the British Long Eighteenth Century. Analyzing a selection of Classical, Early Modern, and Enlightenment works and the intertextual relationships between them, this study argues that ancient models of literary immortality, which for centuries had rested on increasingly unstable rhetorical structures, reached a crisis in the early part of the eighteenth century, with consequences for the later history of both poetry and literary criticism. Chapter I introduces the methods and aims of the study and outlines the topics to be covered. Chapter II presents the longstanding Ancient-Modern controversy as a historical context for understanding the “battle of the books” and adjacent eighteenth-century texts, and examines the inherent paradoxes of the humanist project of revitalizing the ancients, with a focus on Petrarch and his reception of the letters of Cicero. Chapter III considers the “monumental” qualities of Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame and the poem’s relationship to classical Greek and Roman eternizing poetry. Close-readings of poems by Pindar and Horace illustrate how these poets treated their works as analogous to physical monuments, epitaphs, and other memorial spaces, and how memory is connected with location and intertext. Chapter IV explores the evolution of the concept of fame in parallel with changing conceptions of the self, as well as changing views of language and translation theory, from the ancient world through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and shows how efforts to capture individual selfhood with greater precision, depth, and vividness were symptomatic of a trend toward viewing the self or soul as essentially incommunicable. This chapter suggests that the outwardly trivial “battle of the books” of the eighteenth century was not concerned merely with the patriarchal status of the ancients or the personal fame of modern poets, but rather signified a critical reevaluation of the viability of text to communicate across changing cultures, languages, and worldviews. Chapter V reviews the conclusions of the foregoing chapters, and looks forward to conceptions of textual eternization after the Enlightenment.
“Th’ estate which wits inherit after death” : immortality in Pope’s Temple of Fame and the “Battle of the Books”
(2015-05) Hemstreet, Jennifer, 1983-; Bertelsen, Lance; Garrison, James D
In this report, I examine Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame in terms of its rhetorical structure as well as its “place” in the post-classical canon. I offer three critical assessments: 1) that Pope’s poem frames itself as a response to Swift’s “Battle of the Books” within the historical moment of a Humanist split; 2) that both Swift’s text and Pope’s represent literary immortality as a central problem in the Ancient-Modern controversy; and 3) that Pope’s poem consciously locates itself within a classical and Humanist tradition of literary self-eternization. I suggest that for Pope, the significance of the Ancients was not merely their primacy or objective excellence, but also their status as a foundation on which the very possibility of literary immortality was predicated. Pope’s Temple, understood in the context of the “battle,” thus invites a reevaluation of the role of classical eternizing rhetoric both in shaping Pope’s own career and, more broadly, in defining the principles of Humanism.