Murderer, bastard, spy: Richard Savage was no stranger to scandal and controversy. And yet, for a man who lived such a varied life, little is known for certain about him. There are rumors, suggestions, and accusations, but little that can be said without debates and arguments. It certainly does not help that Savage is often marginalized in eighteenth-century scholarship as scholars seek to discover and analyze all they can about his more famous, and more upstanding, contemporaries. While Savage's relationship with Johnson is well known and discussed frequently, all that is known of his relationship with Pope is that he contributed information to Pope's Dunciad Variorum (1729) and that Pope later contributed large sums to Savage's support. Pope was the driving force behind Savage's retirement to Wales, possibly alluded to in Johnson's London (1738), as well as the chief financial contributor to this retirement plan. No serious effort has been made to connect these two important episodes in Savage's life, perhaps because no serious effort has been made to establish the extent of his involvement with the Dunciad. It may have been this connection with Pope that drew Johnson to Savage in the first place. The intent of this thesis is to clarify the nature of Savage's collaborations with Pope and the extent of his contributions to the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. The Dunciad seeks to make fun not only of Pope's critics, but of writers who write for bread, the "hack writers" of Grub Street. It was here that Pope would most likely turn to Savage for information; Savage was much better acquainted with those writers than was Pope. But Savage may have done more than simply supply Pope with gossip, and I will consider the possibility that he had a more active role in the publication of the Dunciad Variorum. / Master of Arts

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Le corpus épique du 18e siècle en France, en Angleterre, en Pologne et au Danemark révèle trois types de survivance de l’épopée : (1) une survivance théorique dans la poétique spéculative (dont le modèle relativement incontesté est au 18e siècle l’Art poétique de Boileau), (2) l’épopée héroïque (comme la Henriade de Voltaire), toujours critiquée pour ses imperfections ; et (3) l’épopée comique (sur le modèle du Lutrin de Boileau), au succès bien plus unanime tant au 18e siècle qu’au regard de la postérité : The Rape of the Lock d’Alexander Pope, Peder Paars de Ludvig Holberg, Myszeis d’Ignacy Krasicki. L’épopée ne pourrait-elle ainsi survivre qu’au prix de sa dégradation de l’héroïque au comique ? Le poème héroïque serait-il donc tant étouffé par ses règles qu’il ne puisse exister dans la modernité qu’au prix d’un burlesque libérateur qui en relâche l’emprise ? Si, depuis la fin du 17e siècle, les échecs du genre épique sont régulièrement attribués à sa surthéorisation, il semble pourtant que l’héroïcomique se révèle au 18e siècle la forme par excellence de la régularité poétique. Loin d’être étouffé par ses règles, le genre épique tel que le conçoivent des théoriciens et des poètes inspirés par le classicisme français comme Alexander Pope, Ludvig Holberg, Charles Batteux, Ignacy Krasicki ou F. X. Dmochowski est à la fois régulier et vivant. L’efficacité du genre épique, qui englobe alors l’héroïcomique, dépend de son inscription dans un cadre formel « classique » qui se fonde largement sur les relectures de la Poétique d’Aristote au 18e siècle. Le reconstituer, c’est définir une « lisibilité classique » – c’est-à-dire un horizon d’attente esthétique et normatif dans lequel les règles ne sont pas des slogans, mais définissent réellement des pratiques poétiques signifiantes. La thèse explore, dans ses cinq parties, les implications de cette idée au niveau de la réception des textes épiques modernes (I), de la composition de l’ouverture épique conçue comme patrice du poème (II), des représentations de l’inspiration et du rôle du poète épique (III), de la fiction poétique (la « fable », IV) et de la textualité épique (diction et tableaux épiques, V). Les épopées anglaises, danoises ou polonaises étudiées témoignent ainsi des métamorphoses que connaît au 18e siècle le classicisme, européanisé et vivant – quand les ambitions refondatrices de Voltaire s’inscrivent en faux par rapport à une doctrine normative dont le poète français perçoit, moins que certains de ses contemporains, la productivité. / Considering an epic corpus from 18th-century France, England, Poland and Denmark, the epic genre can be said to exist in the 18th century in several forms. (1) As the theoretical object of speculative poetics (the main model of which is Boileau's Art Poétique). (2) As heroic epics, such as Voltaire's Henriade, which may enjoy success but are whose shortcomings are systematically pointed out by critics. (3) As comic epics (heavily influenced by Boileau's Lutrin), which achieve much greater success than their heroic counterparts both in the 18th century and today: Pope's Rape of the Lock, Ludvig Holberg's Peder Paars, Ignacy Krasicki's Myszeis. Can the epic genre then only survive through comic degradation? Is heroic poetry so smothered by speculative rules of art that it can only survive when burlesque subversion relaxes them?Whereas theoretical over-thinking has been, since the late 17th century, the go-to explanation for the many failures of early modern epic poetry, it seems that heroicomic poetry is actually a paragon of poetic regularity in the 18th century. Far from being asphyxiated by its rules, the epic genre as theorized and practiced by men of letters admirative of French neoclassicism such as Alexander Pope, Ludvig Holberg, Charles Batteux, Ignacy Krasicki or F. X. Dmochowski is both regular and very much alive. An epic is even more efficient the better it fits within a neoclassical framework heavily based on 18th-century reinterpretations of Aristotle's Poetics. To formulate this framework amounts to understanding "classical readability", a set of aesthetic and normative expectations within which poetic rules are not empty slogans but describe actual meaningful poetic techniques.This dissertation examines the implications of this idea with respect to the reception of early modern texts in the 18th century (I), how the opening lines of epic poems are seen to program the bulk of the work (II), the representation of the inspiration and social role of the epic poet (III), epic fiction (the "fable", IV), and the composition of the epic text itself (V). The aforementioned English, Danish and Polish epics are testaments to the transformations of neoclassical poetics and poetry through 18th-century Europe, whereas Voltaire's ambitious attempt at a reform of the neoclassical normative doctrine shows that, in contrast to some of his contemporaries, he failed to perceive its poetic conductivity.

No description available.

In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.