| My dissertation uses as a focal point the obsessive antagonism between Alexander Pope and the “unspeakable” Edmund Curll, the infamous bookseller, to draw a picture of a self-conflicted publishing industry anxious about its own increasingly aggressive commercial practices. This commercialism suggests both new cultural vulnerabilities and new possibilities for the production, control, and dissemination of a national culture in the emerging public sphere. In my study, I not only analyze the rhetorical and metaphorical logic of satires and satirical acts that stigmatize, penalize, and monstrously corporealize the publishing business, but also examine the satires and acts themselves as elements necessarily functioning in the publishing economy—that is, they and their authors or actors participate in the very phenomena that they satirize and condemn.; In my first chapter, I show how the emetic that Pope slipped to Curll and then wrote about in two pamphlets not only displays Curll as a grotesque embodiment of the ills of the book business, but seems aimed at provoking further dubious activity rather than ending, or curing, it.; In Chapter II, I look at the Dunciad in its earlier manifestations both as a mobile, evolving text and as a self-advertised publishing campaign and a sustained media event.; I examine in Chapter III some of the responses to the Dunciad , which have been bibliographically enumerated but not taken seriously themselves as objects for cultural study. Here I read the Grub-street Journal as an conspicuous extension of Pope's satire that keeps the poet's campaign against the Dunces alive during the apparent twelve-year hiatus between the publication of the Dunciad Variorum in 1729 and the New Dunciad in 1742.; My fourth chapter interprets Curll's act of naming his shop and providing it with the sign of Pope's Head as the bookseller's ultimate retort. I place his semiotic act in the context of the poet's audacious scheme to publish his correspondence, Hogarth's satires on sign art, Watteau's extraordinary transcendence of sign art in L'Enseigne de Gersaint, Jacob Tonson's shop name Shakespear's Head, the fine art portraiture of Pope, and anti-Popean graphic satire.; My last chapter considers the rumors about Pope's and Curll's associations with prostitutes and the general equation between prostitution and publishing.; I conclude my examination of Pope and Curll's cultural warfare by proposing as an emblem for the problems of professional identity in the early eighteenth century Hogarth's print-within-the-print in the second state of Distressed Poet. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
