More Solid Learning

Until this book, there has not been a collection that focuses exclusively on Pope's satiric masterpiece. The seeming resistance to fully engage the poem belies its centrality within eighteenth-century culture. Like Gulliver's Travels or The Beggar's Opera, the poem's hybridity actually changes and imrpoves upon the forms it parodically controls. But unlike those texts, it proves difficult to teach, despite multiple points of entry. The essays in this volume attempt to...
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Until this book, there has not been a collection that focuses exclusively on Pope's satiric masterpiece. The seeming resistance to fully engage the poem belies its centrality within eighteenth-century culture. Like Gulliver's Travels or The Beggar's Opera, the poem's hybridity actually changes and imrpoves upon the forms it parodically controls. But unlike those texts, it proves difficult to teach, despite multiple points of entry. The essays in this volume attempt to teach the poem from a variety of perspectives and, in doing so, to illuminate its role as literary history, cultural artifact, and material object. They suggest the ways the poem interacts with and influences the dynamic milieu from which it springs.