Outline for Lecture of 2 February 1998

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

1. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock and the Mock Epic

• Neoclassicism as Style -- Eighteenth-Century Architecture and Poetry
• The Rhetorical Organization of the Neoclassical Couplet
• Mock Epic
• The Rape of the Lock (text of poem)-- Structure and Form
  • introduction
  • epic opening
  • Gentle social and political satire
  • Comic narrative and dialogue
  • Clarissa -- a voice of sanity

2. Jonathan Swift: Satire Horatian and Juvenalian

• Satiric technique -- conceit and analogy
• Hodgart on The Conditions of Political Satire
• Structure and analogy in "A Modest Proposal": An Introduction
  • --satire and eighteenth-century economic theory
  • --who's under attack? the English . . . or the Irish?
  • --the refutatio, or how can satire make a positive point
• Satire as diminishment in Gulliver's Travels I
• Satire as disgust in Gulliver's Travels IV
  • the houyhymns -- ideals or just satiric devices

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