Allusion



Walsh, M ORCID: 0000-0003-4130-6797
(2016) Allusion. In: The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800. Oxford Handbooks . Oxford University Press,Oxford, pp. 649-667. ISBN 9780199600809

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Abstract

Beginning with an examination of some of the ways in which allusion was conceptualized in the eighteenth century, this essay focuses on verbal literary allusion, which exists on the allusive spectrum between frank plagiarism at the one extreme and echo at the other. Close reading of poems by Alexander Pope (the different versions of the Dunciad), William Collins (‘Ode on the Poetical Character’), and Thomas Gray (‘Ode on the Spring’ and ‘The Progress of Poesy’) demonstrates some of the ways in which eighteenth-century poets used the figure of allusion to articulate meaning, and to negotiate the writer’s relation with poetic contemporaries and forebears. Allusion tests the reader’s powers of recognition and invites the reader’s participation; this essay explores some of the opportunities for poetic obfuscation or clarification that the trope offered to both satiric and lyric authors, and some of the possibilities and implications of the poet’s, or editor’s, or poet-editor’s explanatory and interpretative commentary.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: allusion, alexander pope, william collins, Thomas Gray, Dunciad, Ode on the Poetical Character, Ode on the Spring, Progress of Poetry
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 04 Nov 2016 11:54
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 07:27
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3003972