Pope’s War with the Dunces

Pope’s War with the Dunces: Mapping the Public in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain examines Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, a work boasting the largest number of identifiable characters in English literature. By focusing on the role played by cultural periphery (what Pope called “dunces”) in launching new fashions and ideological trends, Baird sheds new light on publicness as an emerging category at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

This work challenges the exclusive nature of the Habermasian public sphere by adopting an original reading of Pope’s text through the lens of space, informed by an interdisciplinary approach that combines social space, thing theory, cultural geography, book history, and digital humanities. Baird demonstrates how The Dunciad enacts in its printed body early forms of contemporary new media. These range from textual strategies encouraging interactive responses from readers to the “game” aspect of the poem, inviting hypertextual readings, to social networks branching out from the text to tell the story of early modernity in strikingly new ways. By employing historical, textual, and computational methods, this book sheds new light on a canonical text and its momentous impact on the emergent public sphere of the time.

A rich, thoroughly researched study, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of literature, as well as book, cultural, and political history.