Recommendations
Books Like The Rape of the Lock
Best books to read after The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
Readers who love The Rape of the Lock — Pope's mock-heroic masterpiece transforming a stolen lock of hair into a five-canto epic — will enjoy these works of mock-heroic poetry, Augustan satire, and the great tradition of comic verse in English.
- 1Buy
The Dunciad in Four Books
by Alexander Pope
Pope's mock-heroic epic on the culture of dullness — after the delicate social comedy of The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad shows the mock-heroic mode turned savage, attacking the hack writers, publishers, and critics who had assailed Pope throughout his career.
- 2Buy
Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
The companion work from Pope's closest friend — Swift's satirical masterpiece deploys the same tools (mock-heroic scale, ironic distance, formal precision) in prose; reading Swift and Pope together gives the fullest picture of Augustan satire at its peak.
- 3Buy
Mac Flecknoe
by John Dryden
Dryden's mock-heroic satire on the poet Thomas Shadwell — the first great mock-heroic poem in English and Pope's direct model for The Dunciad; Mac Flecknoe is shorter and sharper than The Rape of the Lock and shows where the mock-heroic tradition came from.
- 4Buy
An Essay on Man
by Alexander Pope
Pope's philosophical poem in heroic couplets — after The Rape of the Lock's social comedy, An Essay on Man shows the same formal mastery applied to the largest possible subject (the place of man in God's universe); the two together define Pope's range.
- 5Buy
The Beginner's Opera
by John Gay
The companion work from Pope's friend Gay — The Beggar's Opera deploys the mock-heroic method in theatrical form, applying operatic grandeur to London's criminal underworld with the same precision that Pope applied epic grandeur to a drawing-room quarrel.
- 6Buy
Hudibras
by Samuel Butler
The seventeenth-century mock-heroic poem that most directly influenced Pope — Butler's comic poem on Puritanism is the great English mock-heroic before Pope; reading Hudibras shows the tradition Pope was working in and improving upon.
- 7Buy
The Faerie Queene
by Edmund Spenser
The epic original whose conventions Pope is parodying — The Faerie Queene's allegorical system, its supernatural machinery, and its elevated style are the targets of Pope's mock-heroic reversal; knowing Spenser deepens every joke in The Rape of the Lock.
- 8Buy
Aeneid
by Virgil (trans. David Ferry)
The classical epic most immediately behind The Rape of the Lock — Pope's epic machinery (the supernatural guardians, the celestial councils, the arming of the hero) directly parodies Virgil's Aeneid; Ferry's translation is the most readable modern version.
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