Things Fall Together: The Ascent of Chaos and the Obliteration of Meaning in Pope's 1743 Dunciad
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Authors
French, Corey
Issue Date
2010-04-25
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Department of English, University of the South , Sewanee, Tennessee , Alexander Pope , 1743 Dunciad , Allusion , Colley Cibber
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis examines Pope's 1743 Dunciad as a vision of serious moral decay couched in the imagery and language of the apocalyptic. It asserts a reading of the poem as an eschatalogical text in which the decline of taste emblematizes the decline of morality and in which chaos is finally ascendant, subsuming the possibility of meaning into the "deluge of authors [that] cover'd the land."