The rape of the text: reading and misreading Pope's Essay on man

Abstract

Rape of Text deconstructs history of criticism of An on Man to account for, and to reverse, over 200 years of deformation and trivialization of Pope's text by literary critics, philosophers and historians of ideas. First published in 1733-34, An on Man, Alexander Pope's best-known philosophical poem, was highly praised by many of Pope's European contemporaries, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Hume. The poem, divided into four Epistles, deals with nature of man and his place in universe, man as an individual, man in society and man in pursuit of happiness. Voltaire called An on Man - the most beautiful, most useful, most sublime didactic poem in English language, but what was formerly regarded as pinnacle of 18th-century is now largely unread or misread. In contrast, Harold Bloom described as a poetic disaster of absurd theodicy. After showing why commonplaces about inscribed in Pope scholarship are suspect because of mutual and abiding hostility of logocentric and aesthetic traditions of misreading, Solomon rebuts objections made to Pope's philosophy in a series of chapters demonstrating more appropriate strategies for interpreting Pope's persona, tone, methodology, argument and figurality. Cumulatively, chapters characterize a discourse world of middle-state academic sceptism that Pope shared with his admirers. Although characterization of Pope's discourse world in Rape of Text has implications for Pope and for 18th-century scholarship beyond Essay on Man, it also has implications for reading all philosophical poetry. Solomon contends that criticism of Essay on Man is only an extreme example of deformation that occurs routinely when literary critics or philosophers interpret philosophical poetry, and, in final chapter, he calls for a naturalization of philosophical poetry as a genre as necessary remedy to what he suggests is our present willful blindness.