ABSTRACT
The previous chapter demonstrated the pervasiveness of parody both on the borders of the novel and, more importantly, within it. It is doubtful whether parody operates in this latter way in poetry, however, except in the case of such especially ‘novelised’ poems such as Byron’s Don Juan (1819-24) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1930-60), where the poems draw upon the multiple registers, styles and jargons of the contemporary world. Rather, in this chapter we shall see how parody has been used extensively in establishing and defending canons of poetic decorum, above all when such canons have appeared to be under threat-at the beginning of the eighteenth century, for example, and again at the century’s end. But we shall also have occasion to recognise, again, the productiveness of parody; that is, that the very act of writing parody involves writers in the relativisation of literary languages which it is sometimes their express purpose to combat. The more writers mock the ‘bad’ poetry of others by means of parody, the more they contribute to the very proliferation of competing styles: just the situation that they seek to resist. This paradox will be especially apparent in the ensuing discussion of neoclassical and, particularly, Scriblerian parodic practicesScriblerian being the name for the group of writers gathered
around Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift in the early eighteenth century, who shared a set of broadly conservative cultural and political attitudes.
