Download or read book A History of Augustan Fable written by Mark Loveridge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.