Deceit, desire, and The Dunciad: mimetic theory and Alexander Pope – and – Birthing the canon: Eliot, Hegel, Marx and literary labour

Essay 1: This paper analyses Alexander Pope’s depiction of apocalypse in his seminal satiric masterpiece, The Dunciad. Rene Girard’s mimetic theory explains Pope’s relationship to his literary rivals and his motivation in writing, expanding and obsessing over this work throughout the entire course of his life. This paper reads Pope’s literary and critical efforts to control the literary scene of early eighteenth-century England in a Girardian framework. Essay 2: This two-part study examines the process of literary canon formation. I begin by relating T.S. Eliot’s theory of canon formation as discussed in the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, to Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Mind. In part two of this study I apply the Marxist concept of ‘alienation’ to literary productionin the early 18th century. I argue that the level of ‘alienation’ an author experienced was a major factor in determining that author’s chance at canonization.