Notes 1 Introduction 1. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition. In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759): 42. 2. ‘Aye, There’s the Rub’. Interview with Phillip Pullman, The Observer, Review (27 November 2005). 3. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Jacques Lacan’, in John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979): 116. 4. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Jacques Lacan’: 116. 5. On the notion of the possible ‘monumentality’ or independence of works of literature see M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V.W. McGee, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986): 95. Cited in Graham Allen, Inter-textuality. The New Critical Idiom Series (New York and London: Routledge, 2000): 19. 6. See David Boucher’s discussion in his ‘In Defence of Collingwood: Perspect- ives from Philosophy and the History of Ideas’, in R.G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, eds David Boucher, Wendy James, and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005): xcvi–xcvii. Note also Joyce Appleby, ‘One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving beyond the Linguistic: A Response to David Harlan’ in American Historical Review, 94 (1989): 1327. 7. The English translation of Roland Barthes’s original, influential essay was reprinted as ‘The Death of the Author’ in the Barthes essay collection Image-Music-Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana-Collins, 1983): 142–48. For a succinct account of the manner in which Foucault shortly thereafter elaborated on and extended Barthes’s fundamental ideas and the ways in which the autonomy of the indi- vidual author was systematically reduced in much subsequent theory, see Donald E. Pease’s contribution s.v. ‘Author’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 105–17. 8. This notion of the ‘positive ethos’ of post-modern parody was most fully explored in works such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985). See the discussion pertaining to Hutcheon and her work in Chapter 2. For other, wide-ranging and general revaluations of the parodic mode, see Catherine Bernard, ‘The Cultural Agenda of Parody in Some Contemporary English Novels’ in European Journal of English Studies, 3, no. 2 (1999): 167– 89; Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Illusions of Parody’ in American Studies 30, no. 2 (1985): 225–33; Seymour Chatman, ‘Parody and Style’ in Poetics Today, 22, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 25–39; Vincent Crapanzano, ‘The Postmodern Crisis: Discourse, Parody, Memory’ in Amy Mandelker, ed., Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 234 Notes 235 1995): 119–36; Michele, Hannoosh, ‘The Reflexive Function of Parody’ in Comparative Literature, 41, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 113–27; Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Parody as Cultural Memory’ in REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 21 (2005): 31–44; Robert Phiddian, ‘Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?’inNew Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1997): 673–96; M.N. Scott, ‘On the Nature of Parody’ in Northwest Review 30, no. 3 (1992): 6–11. 9. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981): 71. 10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991): 17. 11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: 17–18. 12. See, for example, Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000): note the subsequent discussion of Harries’s ideas in Chapter 2. 13. Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature. 2nd edn (1989; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 96–7. 14. Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature: 90. 15. The notion of a ‘culture of repudiation’ as ‘the systematic examination of the high culture of bourgeois society, with a view to exposing and rejecting its assumptions’ is clearly if polemically addressed in some detail in Roger Scruton’s Modern Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2000): 123–34; esp. 132–3. 16. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938): 318–19. 17. Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature: 138. 18. John Beale was the London printer who, in 1631, printed for bookseller Robert Allott several of Jonson’s later plays, including Bartholomew Fair (1614). On their professional relationship, see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson: Dram- atist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 253–5. 19. On the Poetomachia or ‘War of the Theatres’ involving Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Dekker, and George Chapman, generally, see R.A. Small, The Stage Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So-Called Poetasters (Breslau: 1899). 2 ‘We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought’: Or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody 1. Robertson Davies, World of Wonders [1975] in The Deptford Trilogy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983): 633. 2. Leavis’s remarks on parody were reprinted in The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. Kingsley Amis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), xiv–xv. They originally appeared in 1962 in the British weekly, The Spectator,on which occasion they had been prompted by a review, by Julian Jebb, of a recent parody anthology. Jebb had praised the perceptive and critical powers of parody, noting that ‘the most satisfying parody presupposes an intensity and acuteness of reading from which sympathy cannot be wholly 236 Notes absent, and to sustain the perverse creativity necessary, the parodist must identify himself with his subject ’. To this generous assessment of the creative possibilities of parody and recognition of the necessary empathy of an effective parodist, Leavis had replied: ‘There is only one thing that could be learnt by the attempt to parody a writer whose distinction makes him worthy of close study; that is, how inaccessible to any but the most superfi- cial, and falsifying, the truly characteristic effects of such writers are. The cult of parody, in fact, belongs to that literary culture which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of creative genius and vital originality’. See The Spectator (2 January 1962): 13. On Leavis’s specific proposal that the parody ‘was to be deplored because it demeaned the integ- rity of [its] subject’, see also D.J. Taylor, ‘Too Funny for Words’, review of Craig Brown’s This is Craig Brown,inThe Spectator (8 February 2003). Leavis’s own criticism and style attributed to one ‘Simon Lacerous’ and included in Frederick C. Crews’s extraordinarily clever collection of academic parodies, The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook (London: Robin Clark, 1984), inspired his well-known parody, ‘Another Book to Cross Off Your List’. 3. William Hazlitt’s frequently repeated observation that ‘Rules and models destroy genius and art’ was first included in his essay ‘On Taste’ in his Sketches and Essays (1839). 4. J.B. Price, ‘Parody and Humour’, in Contemporary Review, no. 180 (1951): 243. 5. See Dwight Macdonald, ed. Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm and After (New York: Random House, 1960): 563–4. 6. Simon Brett’s successful Faber Book of Parodies (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) includes a mere handful of parodies of the works of Restoration and eighteenth-century authors, and cites only three very short examples of parodic material actually written in the Augustan period. Walter Hamilton’s impressive Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors, 5 volumes (London: Reeves and Turner, 1884–89) had of course favoured the work of nineteenth-century authors over that of their predecessors. The trend continued in collections such as Carolyn Wells’s A Nonsense Anthology (1902; rpt. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1930), and belle-lettres efforts such as Ralph Lyon’s The Mocking Bards: A Collection of Parodies, Burlesques, and Imitations (Evanston, Illinois: Ridgeville Press, 1905). A notable exception to the rule was William Zaranka’s Brand X Anthology of Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Apple-wood Books, 1981), which at least included a healthy collection of parodies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors ranging from John Dryden and the Earl of Rochester to Samuel Johnson. Kenneth Baker’s Unauthorized Versions: Poems and Their Parodies (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) likewise included a reasonably wide chronological range of parodies from the mainstream English literary tradition. The authors of several influential surveys of eighteenth century verse have likewise tended to devalue literary parody. A generation of critics were taught by critics such as James Sutherland (A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948]) that the optimistic and rule-bound poets of the period valued ‘order’, ‘beauty’, and a polite ‘dignity’ at the expense of innovative and iconoclastic forms of satire and parody, and that parodic activity in the period tended to be restrained and polite and – above Notes 237 all – conservative. Even those literary historians who initially worked to revise this reductive and monolithic conception of eighteenth-century verse tended to be dismissive of literary parody as a creative mode. Eric Roth- stein’s otherwise enormously salutary volume Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Poetry, 1660–1780 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), for example, dismissed most eighteenth-century parodies as wasteful, ‘mali- cious’, ‘playful’, and ‘abusive’, and argued that they were consequently less interesting uses of the past than were, say, classical borrowings (98). Other supposedly ‘revisionist’ histories of eighteenth-century literature (e.g., Leopold Damrosch’s Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988]) conspicuously failed to include any explicit or extended discussion of parody and burlesque.