The Genius of Parody

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 1-14

3. ‘We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought’: Or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 15-48

4. Parody as Plague: Ben Jonson and the Early Anxieties of Parodic Destabilization

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 49-103

5. Minding True Things by Mock’ries: The Henry V Chorus and the Question of Shakespearean Parody

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 104-119

6. John Dryden and Homeopathic Parody in the Early Augustan Battleground

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 120-159

7. Parodying Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard: Richard Owen Cambridge’s An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 160-188

8. Parody, Autobiography, and the Novel: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke and The History of Henry Dumont, Esq., and Miss Charlotte Evelyn

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 189-230

9. Conclusion

   • Robert L. Mack

   Pages 231-233

10. Back Matter

    Pages 234-285

    PDF

Recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity. This study places parody firmly (if paradoxically) where it belongs: at the centre of the literary-creative process in the literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.

• bibliography
• biography
• English
• English literature
• event
• history
• history of literature
• literature
• love
• parody
• William Shakespeare
• British and Irish Literature

'Robert L. Mack's The Genius of Parody makes an exciting contribution to the literary history of the Early Modern period and the eighteenth century. Mack provocatively asserts the centrality of parody in the writing of the period, and traces its operations in literature both familiar and unfamiliar. This is a stimulating, wide-ranging and ambitious book, written in a thoroughly engaging way that manages to combine an impressive range of scholarship with a lively manner of writing.' - Professor Simon Dentith, University of Gloucestershire, UK

ROBERT L. MACK is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Thomas Gray: A Life, published in 2000.

Policies and ethics