Faint Praise and Civil Leer

Book excerpt: "Rowland examines Marvell's political poetry and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, showing how panegyrical writing developed into mock-panegyric and satire, increasingly as much in response to versions of events as to the events themselves. The author then describes how Marvell exploits panegyrical strategies to subvert its conventional deliberative function, as his equal virtuosity at praise and blame actually undermines his ethos and separates his advice from any clear authority capable of implementing it. Moreover, in Marvell the addressee of conventional panegyric, while remaining ostensibly Charles II, is internalized in a series of grotesques resembling, in various ways, the megalomaniacal "Bayes" (Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford). Marvell uses variations on the abuse of the conventional panegyrical arrangement of people, poet, and prince as a metaphor for the abuse of the proper relationship between all signifieds and their signifiers." "Writing a generation later, Swift borrows many of the themes and motifs of The Rehearsal Transpros'd for his satire in A Tale of a Tub, in particular the association of the preface with panegyric, as a metaphor of the reversal that occurs between praiser and praised, vehicle and tenor, when proper relationships are abused. Rowland also explores how Swift moves from the unsatisfactory use of analogy in his panegyrical "Odes," to more satisfactory use of it in the Tale and then concentrates on the prefaces of the Tale as "Panegyrical paratext.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved