Broadsides on the Thames: the social context of The rape of the lock, II, 47-52
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https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.1986.1986.104.0Permanent Link
10.1515/angl.1986.1986.104.0http://hdl.handle.net/11603/26464
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1986Type of Work
application/pdf3 pages
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journal articles
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Towson University. Department of EnglishCitation of Original Publication
Hahn, H. George. "Broadsides on the Thames: The social context of The Rape of the Lock, II, 47-52Subjects
Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744. Rape of the lockAllusions in literature
Thames River (England)
Abstract
[From article]: As Reuben Brower has shown, allusion in Pope is a resource equivalent to metaphor and imagery in other poets1
1 R. A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959).
. Yet it is not merely by literary allusion that Pope achieves comic effect in The Rape of the Lock, II, 47-52, the depiction of Belinda's water passage to Hampton Court. He creates a comic irony in these verses by a careful blend of a Watteau-like scene with heroically allusive overtones and a crude Hogarthian undertone given strength by its appeal to contemporary awareness of abusive language by travellers on the Thames. The dual ironic contexts of the heroic and the prosaic further heighten the poem's comic incongruity.