Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers

by Edited by Earl Miner , Jennifer Brady

• ISBN13: 9780521032018
• ISBN10: 0521032016
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Dryden's writings are studded with names, conspicuously those of his literary predecessors and contemporaries. He defined himself as a writer in relation to other writers, and in doing so was something of a pioneer professional man of letters: poet, playwright, critic, prose stylist, England's foremost verse translator, the first literary historian to provide a conception of periods, and what would now be termed a comparatist. This book looks at Dryden's literary relationships with Ben Jonson and with French authors (notably Corneille), at issues raised by the work thought to be his greatest by Romantic and contemporary readers, Fables Ancient and Modern; and at Samuel Johnson's definition of Dryden, whose biography in Johnson's Lives was the author's favourite. The book has implications for questions of literary reception, influence and intertextuality, as well as for the reputation and context of Dryden himself.

Table of Contents

Contributing authors

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: borrowed plumage, varied plumage

Dryden and negotiations of literary succession and precession

Onely victory in him: the imperial Dryden

Ovid reformed: issues of Ovid, fables, morals, and the second epic in Fables Ancient and Modern

Another and the Same: Johnson's Dryden

Index

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