Name: Aesop Dress'd
Price: 18.67 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Bernard Mandeville
ISBN: 9781975754181

Type

Physical Book

Author

Bernard Mandeville

Publisher

Createspace

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9 x 15.2 x 0.3 cm

Weight

0.10 kg.

ISBN13

9781975754181

Synopsis "Aesop Dress'd"

Their resemblance to the French originals is slight. Not La Fontaine, but Samuel Butler, presides over Dennis's fables; indeed, when Dennis discusses them in the Preface to Miscellanies, he fails to mention La Fontaine, although he devotes a large proportion of his remarks to a defense of Butler's burlesque verse, which he acknowledges as his model.[2] Many people were writing Hudibrastics in the 1680's and 1690's: the propensity of Butler's couplet for arousing laughter had made it a fad.[3] With its jog-trot meter, insinuating swiftness, and jarring double and triple rhymes, the Hudibrastic couplet was ideally suited to the mockery performed by low burlesque. All burlesque works by an incongruity between subject and style; the particular function of low burlesque is to debase an elevated subject by treating it in an undignified manner.[4] So it was that Butler, with the assistance of a crazy style, had exploited the gap between the high pretensions and the ridiculous performances of a Puritan knight and his squire. But of the hordes of scribblers that followed in the wake of Hudibras, scarcely any possessed Butler's sense of satiric propriety. Where his success had been founded on the discrepancy between subject and style that is essential to burlesque, they employed his style with no regard for its suitability to their subjects. Ordinary narrative poems with no satiric intent were decked in Hudibrastic couplets for the sake of a superficial cleverness.[5] Dennis followed the fashion.

Bernard Mandeville

(Author)

View Author's Page

Bernard Mandeville (Rotterdam, November 15, 1670 – Hackney, January 21, 1733) was an influential Anglo-Dutch thinker: physician, satirist, moral philosopher, and proto-economist. He earned his medical degree in Leiden in 1691 and moved to England shortly thereafter, where he practiced as a specialist in nervous and digestive diseases, and became highly esteemed socially.

His most famous work, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), includes the original poem The Grumbling Hive (1705) accompanied by philosophical essays on moral virtue, benevolence, and hypotheses of society.
In this satire, Mandeville presents the paradox: private vices—such as luxury, vanity, or lust—generate social benefits by boosting consumption and employment, while austere virtue detracts from wealth and economic dynamism.

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