The Rape of the Lock
At a Hampton Court card party a lord snips a curl from the head of a celebrated beauty, and the theft escalates through sylphs, spleen and society gossip into a full-dress war. Pope fits Homeric machinery — arming scene, epic simile, descent to an underworld — to a coffee table, so that the scale of the language measures exactly what the beau monde values. Written to laugh two feuding Catholic families back into speaking terms after a real incident, it is the finest mock-epic in English.
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Lineage
- modeled on ↑ The Iliad
- modeled on ↑ The Aeneid
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 76% · 14 shared
- 76% · 13 shared
- 75% · 13 shared
- 75% · 13 shared
- 71% · 14 shared
- 70% · 12 shared