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 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.

• A full history of an important form of English and European literature • Original readings of major eighteenth-century authors • Suggests ways of reading seventeenth- and 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.