45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeThe Dunciad
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1743A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Mock-Heroic Satire
The Dunciad is a mock-heroic satire, meaning it subverts all the elements traditionally associated with a heroic epic. Instead of being brave and adventurous, the protagonist is cowardly and lazy. The gifts and skills that are normally bestowed upon an epic hero are instead things like chamber pots and worthless pamphlets. Where an epic might tell a timeless tale that connects with the reader’s humanity, uplifting the soul and highlighting the best qualities of its characters, The Dunciad ridicules its characters and points out their worst flaws. The structure remains the same, but everything else is a fun-house mirror reflection of the classical hero tale.
Allusion and Parody
An allusion is an indirect reference to something outside of the text, usually another literary work. Allusions differ from citations and other more direct references in that they don’t usually specify their source, so those unfamiliar with the original material might not recognize that a reference has been made at all. Alexander Pope scatters allusions all through The Dunciad. Virgil’s Aeneid and the Bible are the two most common sources, but there are many others.
A parody is an imitation of the style of a particular writer or genre, usually exaggerated for comic or critical effect. Satires like The Dunciad are often parodies—this one parodies the heroic epic, as described above—but Pope also includes dozens of individual parodies throughout the poem. Many of the poem’s allusions appear in the form of parodies of their source material. Rather than pointing fun at the sources, however, these parodies highlight the base nature of the Dunces and serve to add classical flavor to the mock-heroic tale being told.
Heroic Couplets
Another way that Pope hammers home that the subjects of his satire are far removed in skill, artistry, and esteem from their classical counterparts is by writing The Dunciad in heroic couplets. Heroic couplets consist of rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter. It’s the rhyme scheme that Geoffrey Chaucer used for The Canterbury Tales, and it leant a formal elegance to Pope’s bathroom humor in The Dunciad.
Most of Shakespeare’s works are in iambic pentameter as well, rhymed or unrhymed, as is John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Henry Howard’s 16th-century translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare and Milton are both referenced in the notes, and there are countless allusions to Virgil’s epic poem throughout The Dunciad.
Related Titles
By Alexander Pope
