SOURCE: "Aesopian Examples: The English Fable Collection and its Authors, 1651-1740," in The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740, pp. 14-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Lewis examines the ways in which British writers such as John Ogilby and Samuel Richardson either modified Aesop's fables or alluded to them in their own writing in order to reflect the political instability that occurred in the country during the late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries.

Gi; prevailing Tales: the Major Collections =~ Sprevailing Tales: the Major Collections

More than one European country adopted fables into a native literary tradition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the major fable collections produced in England between 1651 and 1740 are no exception. Despite their differences from one another, they are very uniquely and deliberately English, and together they consitute a figural response, often self-consciously organized within the English language, to England's notoriously...