| 总结: | This thesis examines the editorial craft behind Alexander Pope’s self-published letters to reveal how these complex social and literary texts illuminate both the self-representative strategies of their author-editor and the ambiguous status of the letter within eighteenth-century culture. Through a series of chapter case studies, it examines manuscript letters alongside those published in Pope’s lifetime, including two editions published by Edmund Curll in 1726 and 1735, and the three editions which Pope released in both acknowledged and anonymous forms between 1737 and 1741. These publications contain varied selections and sequences of letters, and many textual alterations ranging from minute detail to entirely fabricated letters. The result is a proliferation of meticulously edited and curated correspondence, which together forms a shifting and complex textual corpus that has never been fully critically discussed as part of Pope’s oeuvre. This thesis seeks to explicate different aspects of Pope’s editorial practice to demonstrate the value of interrogating these reconstructed texts. It employs a combination of digital, critical, qualitative, and quantitative methods in order to analyse, in greater detail than has previously been attempted, the connections and disparities between formats, and to situate the remediated letters in their biographical and literary context. The range of correspondences covered by the thesis reveals that Pope adapted his approach to suit different manuscript addressees and print audiences, and to explore how the resonances of different relationships could complement and corroborate his poetic modes of self-representation.
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