Brief Description
Examines the role the fable played in the development of English literature and culture in the period 1651 1740."
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Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. In The English Fable, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis describes 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 non-literary forms, fable is shown to have played a major role in the formation of modern English culture.
On the Back Cover
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.
