John Dryden and Homeopathic Parody in the Early Augustan Battleground

Abstract

The preceding chapters have maintained that the earliest years of the seventeenth century witnessed a fundamental shift in established attitudes towards derivative imitation and text-specific parodic appropriation in English. I have suggested that this same shift in attitude — a transformation that can already be seen manifesting itself (albeit in significantly different ways) in the writings of both Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare — precipitates a deeply consequential change in the conditions that govern poetic activity throughout the subsequent decades. The textual anxieties that so clearly evince themselves for the first time in the early years of the seventeenth century can in fact serve as an analogical model for the more wide-ranging literary instability that characterized the work of a great many writers in the years immediately following the Restoration. The breakdown of a particular kind of literary standard — the collapse of a generally accepted ethic of authorial possession and authority — resulted in the bewildering hyper-demoticization of literary and journalistic discourse in the latter half of the seventeenth century.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyOpening LineLiterary CulturePolitical OpponentEenth CenturyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.