A History of Augustan Fable
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 11/12/1998
EAN 9780521630627, ISBN10: 0521630622
Hardcover, 296 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
This book explores the tradition of fable across a wide variety of written and illustrative media, from its origins in classical antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. It offers both a history and a poetics of the genre, presenting a body of evidence to show the stable and transhistorical qualities of fable, while showing that many individual writers consciously employed these qualities in dynamic and witty ways highly responsive to their own historical and cultural moment. Tracing the impact of classical and European models on verse and moral fables of the eighteenth century, and the use of the fable by major writers - including Dryden, Pope, Mandeville, Swift, Gay and Cowper - in their historical and literary contexts, Mark Loveridge offers a full account of a significant form of English and European literature and suggests new ways of reading eighteenth-century literature.
List of illustrations
Preface and acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Fables and novels
3. The Peachum position
4. History, transmission, kindred
5. The fable in the wars
Ogilby and after
6. Transitions
Dryden to Mandeville
7. High Augustan fable
Mandeville, Swift and Gay
8. Gay to Cowper
the diaspora of fable
References
Index.