Document Type
Essay
Abstract
Alexander Pope as the most representative poet of his age is very much concerned with 'high' and 'low' culture and art. He ascribes socio-cultural decline to vulgar taste in literature and criticism. An exemplar poem in which he addresses the matter of taste is The Dunciad in which the poet traduces and censures some of his contemporary literary figures, excoriating them for producing works which according to him promulgate vulgar taste and aestheticism. Pierre Bourdieu has stressed the overarching significance of taste in classifying people into different strata and social spaces. Arguing for the centrality of the notion of taste in Pope's conception of culture and art, the aim in this article is to examine it in the light of Bourdieu's theorization of culture. The writers examine the modality of taste as a social marker in Pope's seminal poem. As such, central to the analysis is Pope's appropriation of and contribution to the discourse on taste as a means of self-fashioning, of consolidating his status as the arbiter of 'true' taste in literature.
Repository Citation
Pirnajmuddin, Hossein, and Ebrahim Zarei. "Taste in Pope’s The Dunciad: A Bourdiesian Reading." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–13. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/5