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This paper examines the interplay between astronomical crisis and Scriblerian sublime in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic, The Dunciad. Pope’s fascination with contemporary astronomical debates, controversies, and discoveries asserts his position as a science-conscious writer. Despite his Scriblerian connection, which often targeted the arrogance of the contemporary scientist, his possible viewership of the Censorium lectures of Isaac Newton’s pupil, William Whiston document Pope’s unavoidable interest in astronomy. However, The Dunciad’s astronomical register does more than record scientific discourse: it captures a parabolic treatment of these scientific advances through which the paradigmatic crisis to which the mock-epic gives vent is exposed. Inherent in Pope’s symbolic treatment of cosmic inflation is the promotion of astronomical crisis as a figurative byword for the crisis of sense during the Age of Reason. By purposefully negating the ‘truthful’ principles of Newtonian science, the poem treats universal and individual bombast as offsprings of mock-orderliness, unintelligibility, and nonsense. With the intention of driving off non-sensicality from the 18th century republic of letters, the poem utilises the Scriblerian reductio ad absurdum under the guise of astronomical crisis. Accordingly, this narrative tactic which catches the end of Pope’s bathetic method suggests that celestial crisis channels the narrative sublime of the poem. Thus, it adapts Longinian sublimity to the contemporary need of metaphorical negativity which is represented by the astronomical foundation of the poem. Identifying the astronomical crisis of The Dunciad as part of its sublime character, the paper will arrive at the conclusion that Pope’s science-conscious writing forms an inevitable aspect of his Scriblerian self. Eventually, it signals the birth of a new aesthetics of sublimity in eighteenth-century English fiction which revolves around its unique, error-sphaericus.
| Keywords | The Dunciad, Alexander Pope, crisis, sublime, astronomy |
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| selenaerkzan@gmail.com |