Recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity. This study places parody firmly (if paradoxically) where it belongs: at the centre of the literary-creative process in the literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.

ROBERT L. MACK is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author ofThomas Gray: A Life, published in 2000.

Introduction 'We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought': or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody Parody as Plague: Ben Jonson and the Early Anxieties of Parodic Destabilization Minding True Things by Mock'ries: The Henry V Chorus and the Question of Shakespearean Parody John Dryden and Homeopathic Parody in the Early Augustan Battleground Parodying Pope's Eloisa to Abelard : Richard Owen Cambridge's An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room Parody, Autobiography and the Novel: Charlotte Charke's The History of Mr. Henry Dumont, Esq., and Miss Charlotte Evelyn Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index