The genius of parody : imitation and originality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature /

Mack (Univ. of Exeter, UK) strives for a conception of parody that is both theoretically sound and can account for the variety of parodic practice in early modern England. He offers here not a comprehensive survey of the form but a series of case studies dating from the beginning of the 17th century, when parody assumed a new form and importance, through the middle of the 18th. His examples are not obvious: Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour; Shakespeare's Henry V; John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; Richard Owen Cambridge's An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room, a parody of Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard; and Charlotte Charke's autobiography and novel. Mack shows these authors engaging in parody and resisting the parodic attacks of others, suggesting that conventional preconceptions about the supposedly parasitic form do not do justice to parody's creative and intertextual role in much early modern literature. Mack never offers a single coherent "theory," though he does complicate many of the assumptions that have dominated recent critical discussions, e.g., Simon Dentith's Parody (CH, Mar'01, 38-3728) and Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (CH, Dec'85). Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researcher, faculty. J. T. Lynch Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark