Pope’s War with the Dunces: Mapping the Public in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)

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 and 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 br