About the author:
Tatiana G. Chesnokova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9326-4520
Abstract:
The article examines the seeds of the historical approach to the description of literary and critical phenomena in A. Pope’s literary heritage. The focus is on the mechanisms of formation and the links of those “historical” elements with the poet’s theoretical views. Basing on classicist’s points, Pope transfers his attention from the rules’ matter to their source (seen in the experience of writing) and the way of applying them to the sphere of literary criticism. It conditioned special importance for Pope of the categories of judgement, taste and “Nature methodiz’d” and formed his interest to the issues of literary criticism. Demanding that both poets and judges of poetry satiate their practice with theory, Pope starts the opposite movement as well: from ready critical formulas to their test and improvement in the process of writing and reviewing. This leads to the widening of the scope of historical description within the framework of theoretical comprehension of such subjects as criticism and poetry. Pope’s most ambitious theoretical “utterances” (such as An Essay on Criticism and The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated) have the form of a treatise in verse or an epistle, and the “historization” of poet’s theoretical concepts affects their poetic structure, which introduces the elements of historical description. Preparing the ground for the first histories of literature in the late 18th century, such historical reviews remain the essential element of Pope’s theoretical views and poetic works and the part of his age mental culture.