British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dryden in the 1690s: The Virgil and the Fables
Abstract
The politics of Providence in Dryden's Fables
Dr Abigail Williams, University of Oxford
This paper will explore the political contexts of Dryden's Fables by examining the concept of Providence within the translations. While there are numerous topical reflections on contemporary political issues within the poems, the Fables ultimately frustrate the application of sustained political allegory. In this essay I hope to offer some ideas about how we might link the local allusion to broader narrative structures by exploring the significance of Providence in the poems. I shall be arguing that through his translations and additions in the Fables Dryden offers a critique of contemporary Whig providential argument and historiography. This critique is evident both at a local level - in Dryden's specific interventions and comments on the fallacies of providential explanation - and at a wider level, in that the poems comment on patterns of causation and order. The widespread contemporary identification of a Providential order behind the events of recent history was effectively a matter of interpretation: Williamite providentialism was an exegetical practice that focused attention on the identification of meaning in historical narrative. It may be that some of the interpretative difficulties we have in reading the political 'message' or morality of the Fables are a result of Dryden's questioning of such interpretation and of the inference of meaning behind a history of events.
Related publications
Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1715 (OUP 2005).
'The poetry of the unenlightened: politics and literary enthusiasm in the early eighteenth century', History of European Ideas 31 (2005), 299-311.
'Whig and Tory poetics' in The Blackwell's Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed Christine Gerrard (forthcoming, 2006).