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ROBERT L. MACK. The Genius of Parody Imitation and Originality in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Palgrave macmillan 2007. Pp. vi + 285. $85.
Far from being mechanical, derivative or parasitic, parody reveals something central about literary meaning, what Mr. Mack calls the "referential dialectics of creation." Parody makes explicit, and perhaps this accounts for its marginalization, literature's intertextuality its "lack of stable linguistic authority," and the fiction of originality to which many theories of literature cling. Via the "dizzying, eternal mirror of its transformation," it reflects "the inherent instability and the inescapable mutability of any and all textual activity." Central to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and celebrated by postmodernists, parody was, for these reasons, not befriended by "liberal humanist critics." Taking issue with the scholarly commonplace that parody is "critical and conservative," Mr. Mack argues for its transformative capacity - its "troubling" and "recombinative forces. The straw man here is the idea (attributed often unfairly to New Critics) that literary texts - and their authors - have or should strive to have autonomy Parody by contrast is exuberantly social and "conjunctive"; it does not hide its dependent character nor its debt to social convention, and it demand active participation from the reader.