The Poems of Alexander Pope: Volume Three: The Dunciad (1728) & The Dunciad Variorum (1729) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0582423422 ISBN 13: 9780582423428

Publisher: Routledge, 2007

Synopsis

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) is one of the greatest poets in European literature, comparable to the likes of likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats and Wordsworth. He is not easy to read though: his poetry uses dense literary and contemporary contextual allusions. This is why a book that gets the readers to the meaning of his poetry as painlessly as possible is so important.

This volume features the complete text of Pope’s most significant poem, The Dunciad. The first-rate annotations that accompany this edition of the poem provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to the contemporary reader.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The Poems of Alexander Pope is a multi-volume edition of the poetry of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) resulting from a thorough reappraisal of his work, from composition through to reception. Annotations and headnotes, in keeping with the traditions of Longman Annotated English Poets, are full and informative, and the layout is designed to enable the reader to navigate easily between the poems, the record of variants and the editorial commentary. The poems are presented in chronological order of publication, in texts based on the first published edition of each, with original capitalisation, italicisation, punctuation and spelling preserved. A record of selected variants to each poem illustrates the changes Pope made in subsequent editions; and full editorial annotation sets the poems in appropriate literary, historical and cultural contexts. Where Pope’s pre-publication manuscripts are still extant, their readings are also discussed; and issues of design and typography are highlighted in relation to Pope’s detailed management of the forms in which his works appeared. Volumes one and two contain the poetry that appeared between 1709 and 1728, including The Rape of the Lock, An Essay on Criticism and The Temple of Fame.

This third volume, edited by Valerie Rumbold, contains separate texts of The Dunciad. An Heroic Poem of 1728 (a three-book poem with only occasional brief notes) and The Dunciad Variorum of 1729 (a revised version of the three-book poem with authorial commentary and apparatus). This free-standing presentation of the 1728 poem makes possible a new focus on the briefer and more enigmatic form in which the poem was known to its first readers, and highlights the contrast with the 1729 poem, here presented with its full panoply of authorial apparatus. Throughout the editorial annotation there is sustained discussion of the surviving evidence about Pope’s lost manuscript drafts, with detailed attention to the poems’ historical, political and social contexts, and an up-to-date appraisal of the critical and scholarly tradition.

Volumes four and five will contain the poetry that appeared between 1730 and Pope’s death in 1744, including An Essay on Man and the Horatian epistles.When complete, The Poems of Alexander Pope will represent the most informative and thorough edition of Pope’s poetry and will become a standard point of scholarly reference for all those concerned with Pope and his age.

 

 

About the Author:

Valerie Rumbold is Senior Lecturer in English at the Universityof Birmingham. She has published a range of articles on Pope and on eighteenth-century women writers. Her book Women’s Place in Pope’s World (1989) was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the BritishAcademy. She also edited the Longman Annotated Texts edition of Alexander Pope: The Dunciad in Four Books (1999).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0582423422
• ISBN 13: 9780582423428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 440
• Editor: Rumbold Valerie