ABSTRACT
The previous chapter showed how, by metamorphosing texts into women’s bodies and women’s bodies into texts, satires such as Sober Advice from Horace, the Dunciad, and the Battle of the Books worked to thematize the risks of a visually-based epistemology and a visually-experienced literature. The enterprise of looking, they suggest, can all too quickly become a mode of fetishism, idealization, or reification. If the beholder is not careful, these texts seem to caution, he or she loses all sense of ethical and intellectual bearings, all capacity for critical thought.
