A History of Augustan Fable

"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 on 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 the first full account of a significant form of English and European literature and suggests new ways of reading eighteenth-century literature."--Jacket.

First sentence: This study will explore relationships between different aspects and manifestations of the term 'fable', in particular in the period between the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century and the start of the French revolutionary wars near the end of the eighteenth century.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

1

Pages

294

ISBN

9780521032285

Data source: Wikidata