Hudibras Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alvin Snider

Critical Essay by Alvin Snider

SOURCE: "As Aeneas Bore His Sire," in Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 163-82.

In the following essay, Snider compares Butler's Hudibras to other Restoration epics, including Paradise Lost, and argues that it occupies a "liminal space between the end of epic and the rise of the novel."

If, for most twentieth-century readers, Butler and Milton lie poles apart, from the vantage point of the Restoration they were 'contemporaries' in every sense of the word. Born within a few years of each other, they breathed the same air of revolution and dissent, even though they reacted in obviously different ways. Their writings in prose and verse present alternative political and aesthetic responses to the same problematic: the establishment of a normative literary, religious, and political order after the collapse of an established system of values. Both poets opened new possibilities in...
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