Pope and the Reformation of the Oral: The Iliad in the History of Mediation

Abstract

Abstract:This essay frames Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad (1715–1720) as a key moment in the history of print culture and as a self-conscious reflection on a contemporary media shift in which Pope was a key actor. I contend that Pope's Iliad project works as part of a broader impulse to evaluate print and theorize its ethics by regulating and revaluing the oral, putting it under a polite and enlightened domain, and exposing those who manipulated rhetoric as slippery and untrustworthy, if also hypnotic and persuasive.