English 525A Grub Street Lockwood

This is the third in a series of seminars I have been giving on representations of the non-elite in 18th-century Britain, following earlier outings on “Lowlife” and “Crime and Punishment.” This time the subject is the literary low: the hacks and dunces who scribbled for starvation pay in the garrets of Grub Street (a real place in a dodgy part of London as well as a figurative address). We will concentrate on works like Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Pope’s Dunciad, Fielding’s play The Author’s Farce, and Johnson’s memorable depiction of the Grub-Street world in his Life of Savage. Two critical questions undergirding the seminar will be the meaning of literary quality and the making of canonical literary reputation. How do you get to be a despised dunce or an admired writer? Students will get considerable exposure to major literary figures as well as a small army of nobodies, some important themes of the period literary culture, and relevant contemporary critical discourse on this subject. No previous work in the period is needed.