Between 1651 and 1740 there was in England an explosion of interest in Aesop's fables, and in the fable as a literary form. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis shows how the fable, often underestimated because of its links with popular non-literary forms, played a major role in the formation of modern English culture.

This book aims to account for that stability. It ask what about fables encouraged their survival, indeed their proliferation, in a contentious and transitional age. It ask what about that age, impatient with so many longstanding genres, disposed it so kindly toward Aesop's fables the most ancient and, in their unvarying division between story and moral, the most rigid of symbolic forms.