The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

by Paddy Bullard (Editor)

Overview

Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth-century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth-century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to the first decade of the seventeenth-century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192859112
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Pages:	752
Product dimensions:	9.81(w) x 6.84(h) x 1.52(d)

About the Author

Paddy Bullard, Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History, University of Reading

Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. Formerly he was a research fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (Voltaire Foundation, 2016). With Timothy Michaels he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.

Table of Contents

List of Figures xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

Notes on Contributors xvii

1 Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire Paddy Bullard 1

Part I Satirical Alignments

2 Corporate Acts of Satire Judith Hawley 23

3 Against Hypocrisy and Dissent Marcus Walsh 39

4 The Satire of Dissent George Southcombe 56

5 The Female Wits: Gender, Satire, and Drama Claudine van Hensbergen 74

6 National Identity and Satire David O'Shaughnessy 91

7 Banter, Nonsense, and Irony: Churchill and his Circle Adam Rounce 108

8 Foxite Satire: Politics, Print, and Celebrity Robert W. Jones 125

Part II Satirical Inheritances

9 The Double Personality of Lucianic Satire from Dryden to Fielding Nicholas McDowell 145

10 The Invention of Dryden as Satirist Matthew C. Augustine 161

11 Alexander Pope and the Philosophical Horace Kristine Louise Haugen 177

12 Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire Daniel Carey 193

13 Believing and Unbelieving in The Dunciad Sophie Gee 212

14 Augustan Romantics Matthew Scott 228

Part IV Satirical Objects

15 Mixing It: Satire in the Miscellanies, 1680-1732 Paul Baines 249

16 Fable and Allegory Gillian Wright 266

17 Burlesque and Travesty: Pope's Early Satires Bonnie Latimer 281

18 Graphic Satire: Hogarth and Gillray Jesse Molesworth 298

19 Romance, Satire, and the Exploitation of Disorder Jonathan Lamb 320

20 Dramatic Satire Ros Ballaster 336

21 The Practice of Parody David Francis Taylor 353

Part IV Satirical Objects

22 Satirical Objects Sean Silver 371

23 Science and Satire Gregory Lynall 387

24 Against the Experts: Swift and Political Satire Paddy Bullard 403

25 The Body of Thersites: Misanthropy and Violence Helen Deutsch 420

26 Self-portraiture Louise Curran 438

27 'Little Snarling Lapdogs': Satire and Domesticity Melinda Alliker Rabb 457

Part V Satirical Actions

28 Thinking about Satire Ashley Marshall 475

29 Epigram and Spontaneous Wit Kate Loveman 492

30 Satire as Event John McTague 509

31 Legal Constraints, Libellous Evasions Joseph Hone 525

32 Quarrelling Alexis Tadié 542

33 Sexing Satire Jill Campbell 558

34 Ridicule as a Tool for Discovering Truth Lawrence E. Klein 575

Part VI Satirical Transitions

35 Moralizing Satire: Cross-Channel Perspectives James Fowler 595

36 Pamela and the Satirists: The Case for Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela (1741) Jennie Batchelor 613

37 The Edge of Satire: Post-Mortem and Other Effects Peter Robinson 628

38 Satire to Sentiment: Mixing Modes in the Later Eighteenth-Century British Novel Lynn Festa 645

39 Satire in the Age of the French Revolution Jon Mee 661

40 Out of Somerset: Or, Satire in Metropolis and Province Carolyn Steedman 680

41 Satire, Morality, and Criticism, 1930-1965 Clare Bucknell 696

Index 713

Editorial Reviews

"a collection of brilliant and intentionally provoking essays about how we have studied satire, how we study it now, and how, implicitly, we might study it in the future." — Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

From the Publisher