A Side of Text

I don't understand the use of epigraph materials. And of all the things that have been on my mind, this is probably one of the least academically interesting, but I can't help but think about it, seeing as how there are just so many that we are cataloguing and requoting in the database. I consistently have to wonder how epigraphs are being used in each one of these books- does the average reader understand the Latin being quoted? The significance of those particular three or four lines in that poem of Cowper's? And who are some of these people? Thomas Otway has a Wikipedia article, but it's moderately terrible, terrible enough so that scholarship on him can't be as indepth as it is on Shakespeare or Cowper or Pope, and I've never even heard of him before running through all of these epigraphs.

We requote the epigraph material in the database in the 591 field. It's one of my favorites to update because of the quotation aspect of the field (subfield a, I think), but it's also always a puzzling feeling, because its significance and meaning is somehow often distant from the perceived aim of the actual text (which is expressed, through us, by the title and a flip-through of the book).

I wonder how common epigraphs are now. The example that springs to mind is the one that T.S. Eliot uses one in the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and there's something weird and allusive and problematic in the sense that you have to be familiar with the quote from the Inferno, and the Inferno, but I wonder if it's worked the same way in works in the period we're working on. There's certainly some kind of urge to quote, and link a work back to some other, "greater" work, potentially, but without reading the texts in conjunction with the epigraph, I can't say what that relationship is. There's something weird about a quote being one of the first things a reader sees. I wonder what the origins of epigraphs are to begin with - do they have something to do with advertisement? Did they just catch on magically? Does this happen with any literature that precedes our era? How do "false" epigraphs work, epigraphs that quote something fake? Where do those come from?

For my side-reading, partially to address some of these questions as well as to increase my familiarity with periods and authors with whom I'm not as familiar as I should be, I started reading some Pope, who is pretty often epigraphed, alongside Latin figures as well as Cowper and Shakespeare as some of the most common. I've liked "The Rape of the Lock" so far, but I don't understand all the allusions, and it strikes me how important some idea of the historical context is to reading this stuff, because I don't understand a lot of it. Pope's writing is situated in a pretty weird social atmosphere, where he's explicitly both writing for specific people and a broader audience. A lot of literature works to promote itself to the mass-market, with specific demographic in mind - it's not necessarily produced in these private places.

Too much to read and think about for now, though.