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- Title
Such Means of Locomotion: Transits of Voices in Gay's Trivia.
- Authors
Loveridge, Mark
- Abstract
All current accounts of John Gay's poem Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) assume that it is narrated by a single figure, the 'Walker/Poet'. This essay treats it instead as a medley of voices and values shared mainly among the Poet, the straightforward and everyday Walker, and the Author, who writes the poem's Index and the preliminary Advertisement, and whose tones and attitudes infiltrate the poem. The Poet's culture is classical and upmarket, the Author's modern and brash. These presences are partly personae or aspects of Gay himself – a voice identifiable as 'John Gay' narrates one of the poem's paragraphs – but they are also voices in a dramatization of the clash of different kinds of literature and readership. Stressing the flexibility of the poem's rhetorical address brings forward the 'lower' range of discourse occupied in Gay's other works by ballads, songs and fables, and apparently missing from Trivia. This allows Gay's poem to appear more modern, and more fun.
- Subjects
TRIVIA, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (Poem); GAY, John, 1685-1732; LITERARY criticism; POETRY (Literary form); READERSHIP; RHETORIC &; culture
- Publication
English: The Journal of the English Association, 2018, Vol 67, Issue 258, p209
- ISSN
0013-8215
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/english/efy042