British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dryden in the 1690s: The Virgil and the Fables
Abstract
The reception of Dryden's translations in the eighteenth century
Adam Rounce, University of Keele
The reputation of Dryden's translation, and his Fables, Ancient and Modern remained strong throughout the eighteenth century, only entering a decline with the Victorians; the task of this paper will be to examine the particular sorts of uses that Dryden’s translations served, whether as models for literary allusion, or as tools for more wide-ranging critical debate. Attention will therefore be paid to a representative cross-section of Dryden's influences (such as the prose fiction of Samuel Richardson, and the poetry of William Cowper), in an attempt to locate the real significance of Dryden’s translations to the next century.
Related publications:
(ed.), Alexander Pope and his Critics , 3 vols. (Routledge: 2003).
(ed.), The Selected Poetry of Charles Churchill (Trent Editions, 2003).
(Jointly authored with T. A. Mason) 'Alexander’s Feast: the Passes of the Mind', in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. David Hopkins and Paul Hammond (Oxford University Press, 2000).
'Cowper’s Ends', in Romanticism at the Millennium ed. Tim Fulford (Palgrave, 2002)