Gay's ‘Roving Muse’: Problems of genre and intention in Trivia
Gay's ‘Roving Muse’: Problems of genre and intention in Trivia
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盖伊的“流动缪斯”：琐事中的类型和意图问题
DOI：
10.1080/00138388108598114
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发表时间：
1981
期刊：
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Eugene P. Kirk
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Eugene P. Kirk
Critical assessments of John Gay's ethical intention in Trivia (1716) have depended heavily upon a priori perceptions of the work's genre. The range of interpretive possibilities, shaped by generic judgments, offers us John Gays who are practical instructors upon, deplorers of, realists about, and delighted participants in'The Art of Walking the Streets of London'. Identification of literary kind is not always such a fateful critical stance; the neoclassical modes Gay is alleged to have adopted, however, were fraught with traditional implications about an author's ethical purpose. This was especially true in the cases of georgic and formal verse satire, the two idioms to which Trivia is most often assigned. The merits of the'georgic'and'satirical'arguments deserve scrutiny; insofar as Trivia tests them, the boundaries of the two genres become quite blurred. Georgic and satire, outside of Trivia, are ordinarily distinct enough, but Gay's poem mixes them. It becomes a restriction of Gay's art and purpose to insist that either genre predominates.Studies of the English georgic tradition pause, usually fondly, at Gay's place in that genre's history. A grudging estimate, it is true, comes from WP Mustard, who tersely rates Trivia a'cheap imitation'of Swift's' City Shower', 1 which Swift proclaimed Virgilian2 in a rather adversary spirit. Durling helps us understand why little that was flattering to Virgil might be expected from* the Dean (or, by extension, from Trivia which owed'several Hints' to Swift): Durling points out that Swift,
