Synopses & Reviews
Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis decribes the explosion of interest in fable from its origins at the end of the English Civil Wars to its decline, and shows how three Augustan writers--John Dryden, Anne Finch and John Gay--experimented with fable as a literary form. Often underestimated because of its links with popular nonliterary forms, fable is shown to have played a major role in the formation of the modern English culture.
Synopsis
This book aims to account for that stability. It ask what about fables encouraged their survival, indeed their proliferation, in a contentious and transitional age. It ask what about that age, impatient with so many longstanding genres, disposed it so kindly toward Aesop's fables the most ancient and, in their unvarying division between story and moral, the most rigid of symbolic forms.
Synopsis
Between 1651 and 1740 there was in England an explosion of interest in Aesopâs fables, and in the fable as a literary form. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis shows how the fable, often underestimated because of its links with popular non-literary forms, played a major role in the formation of modern English culture.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-229) and index.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction: The English fable; 1. Aesopiean examples: the English fable collection and its authors, 1651 1740; 2. âThe first pieces of witâ: Augustan fable theory and the birth of the book; 3. Common and uncommon characters: the lives of Aesop; 4. Brutal transactions, âmysterious writâ: Aesopâs fables and Drydenâs later poetry; 5. In her âtransparent Laberynthâ: obstructions of poetic justice in Anne Finchâs fables; 6. Risking contradiction: John Gayâs Fables and the matter of reading; 7. The moral; Notes; Bibliography; Index.