A history of Augustan fable

Abstract

This is a daunting book. I have not had the opportunity yet -- eleven years after finding it -- to take it on. I will give a short sketch here of what other readers -- and I, as I hope -- will find in its pages. Loveridge declares on Page 1: 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. He goes on to say that his evidence will show that fable exhibits interesting stable, epochal, or transhistorical qualities as a genre but also that many individual fable writers used fable in a way that was always highly responsive to its historical and cultural moment. He closes his packed first paragraph by saying that The intention is, then, to present something between a history and a poetics of fable. He notes that most people studying fable in English stop with Gay in either 1727 or 1738. I have read with interest Karina Williamson's spirited critique of the book, Double-Handed, in Essays in Criticism, 1999; XLIX: 353 - 361. She criticizes the something between approach announced just above. She also questions the literary-critical method here, which she finds haphazard and even lazy. For her, Loveridge's real interest is in the strategic uses -- the Augustans would have called it the Application -- of fables and of fable. For Loveridge, she urges as she quotes him, fable dissolved outward after 1800 into the novel, philosophy, ethical teaching, nature-poem, sentimental elegy, hymn, lyric, epitaph, literature for children. Augustan fable was particularly adept at the exploitation for subversive purposes of its capacity for open or at least equivocal application. Her title comes from his use of the expression double-handed to describe Augustan fable's power to speak at once for and against structures of power. This reading will certainly make me more sensitive to Gay and to the difference between the thinking in his first and in his second sets of fables: 1727 versus 1738. And I look forward to getting into more of this book, in Williamson's words, challenging rather than satisfying.

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