The Aesopic Fable | Tomoko Hanazaki (essay date 1993-94)
Tomoko Hanazaki (essay date 1993-94)
SOURCE: "A New Parliament of Birds: Aesop, Fiction, and Jacobite Rhetoric," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, Winter 1993-94, pp. 235-54.
[In the following essay, Hanazaki examines the function of animals, and particuarly bird characters, in eighteenth-century British Aesopic fables employed for purposes of political satire.]
I
The fable, one of the most popular traditional generes in English literature, assumes a newly distinctive character in the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century. This, when seen in perspective, has implications for post-Revolutionary political rhetoric and the subsequent history of imaginative literature. Its marked trajectory between 1630 and 1680 has been perceived and illustrated,1 but from a rather misleading angle. Certainly, the political history of the fable had been generally understood by the 1720s, but Samuel Croxall's...
[The entire page is 8211 words long]
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