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 of Thomas Gray: A Life, published in 2000.