The Contested Charm of Dunciad Minor by A. D. Hope

Abstract

How literature is made from literature, what kind of procédés are used in expressing or covering a text with the fabric of quotations in it, how a meta-text regulates the reception of the original text and to what degree it is part of the latter, how a palimpsestic superscription unveils the reading and the understanding of tradition? All these questions pertaining to intertextuality (e. g. citations, allusions, parody, literary travesty, pastiche, etc) are addressed in the article. This is not done purely theoretically, but is applied in the examination of literary affiliations between two poets and their satirical works, the English Augustan poet of the 18th century Alexander Pope and a major twentieth-century Australian Augustan poet A. D. Hope.