Dr. Shef Rogers, co-director of the Centre for the Book, will present two 20-min conference papers back-to-back as part of English and Linguistics Departmental research seminar series.  The presentation will take place at 4 pm on Friday, 28 April, in Burns 4.

The first paper focuses on the textual history of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock within the context of Pope’s coming of age and coming to grips with the realities of his physical handicaps.  Entitled “Profound Learning or Puerile Puns? Pope’s Use of Petronius via Rochester,” the talk examines an allusion to Rochester not previously noted by Pope scholars.  The implicit parallels between Pope and Petronius’s Encolpius further illuminate the highly sexual nature of Pope’s best-known poem.

The second paper also concerns Pope and his contemporaries, looking at how they used mock-scholarly indexes to satirise an increasingly professionalised world of scholarship and academia.  Entitled “The Satiric Literary Index as a Measure of Cultural Authority,” this talk considers satiric indexes from William King’s 1698 ‘index’ to Charles Boyle’s second edition of Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations … Examin’d through Alexander Pope’s Dunciad in Four Books (1743).  These experiments with form and arrangement show authors striving to enrich their satire even as they objected to the reduction of literature to taxonomic analysis.