The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Oxford Handbooks)

"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 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."-- Provided by publisher Cover The Oxford Handbook of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SATIRE Copyright Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Chapter 1: Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire Satirical Commonalities Satirical Materials Satirical Personalities Parts of the Handbook Part I: SATIRICAL ALIGNMENTS Chapter 2: Corporate Acts of Satire The Rage of Party The Court Wits Tropes of Corporation New Forms of Association The Scriblerians Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 3: Against Hypocrisy and Dissent Samuel Butler John Dryden Jonathan Swift Satire, Reception, Interpretation Select Bibliography Chapter 4: The Satire of Dissent Uniformity and Persecution Painters, Poets, and War Defoe and Dissenting Satire Conclusions Select Bibliography Chapter 5: The Female Wits: Gender, Satire, and Drama The Female Wits Fair Targets? Stage Reform and Female Dramatists The Muses Respond Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 6: National Identity and Satire Swift, History, and the Scots Rebellion, Opportunity, and Enlightenment post-1745 Parliament and the Theatre of Patriot Politics after 1782 Select Bibliography Chapter 7: Banter, Nonsense, and Irony: Churchill and his Circle The Nonsense Club Churchill Select Bibliography Chapter 8: Foxite Satire: Politics, Print, and Celebrity Sheridan’s School for Scandals A Question of Anticipation Esto Perpetua: The Rolliad, Probationary Odes, and Political Miscellanies Foxite and Anti-Foxite Satire Select Bibliography Part II: SATIRICAL INHERITANCES Chapter 9: The Double Personality of Lucianic Satire from Dryden to Fielding The English Lucian Lucian and the ‘Men of Wit and Satyr’ Dryden and a ‘naturally Sceptic Age’ ‘Profane and Debauched Deists’—and Swift Fielding’s ‘true Wit and Humour’ Select Bibliography Chapter 10: The Invention of Dryden as Satirist Unlikely Beginnings Poet Laureate and ‘Poet Bayes’ Apotheosis Select Bibliography Chapter 11: Alexander Pope and the Philosophical Horace Reading for Philosophy What Was Horace? From Lyric to Satire Pope and Epistle 1.6: Discretion and Indiscretion Select Bibliography Chapter 12: Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire Travel as a Satirical Occasion The Art of Travel Lying Travellers Gulliver’s Travels Select Bibliography Chapter 13: Believing and Unbelieving in The Dunciad Pope’s Fictions Religion and Fiction Warburton and Pope Select Bibliography Chapter 14: Augustan Romantics The Horatian Context Horace and the Romantic Critique of Empire Rural Effusions Horatian Wordsworth Byron’s Augustan Romanticism Select Bibliography Part III: SATIRICAL MODES Chapter 15: Mixing It: Satire in the Miscellanies, 1680–1732 The Dryden–Tonson Miscellanies (1684–1709) Alternative Miscellanies (1685–1708) Poems on Several Occasions (1680–1732) Pope and Swift in the Miscellanies (1709–1732) Select Bibliography Chapter 16: Fable and Allegory Aphra Behn, Æsop’s Fables (1687) John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (1687) Anne Finch: A Life in Fables Fable and Satire Select Bibliography Chapter 17: Burlesque and Travesty: Pope’s Early Satires Pope’s Satiric Methodology: The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris Burlesque, Parody, and Travesty in the Early Eighteenth Century Mock-Essays: Guardian 40 and Peri Bathous Satiric Drama: Three Hours after Marriage Mock-Heroic: The Rape of the Lock Select Bibliography Chapter 18: Graphic Satire: Hogarth and Gillray Two Visions of Apocalypse: Hogarth and Pope Two More Visions of Apocalypse: Gillray and Sheridan Select Bibliography Chapter 19: Romance, Satire, and the Exploitation of Disorder The Confident Disorder of Romance Realism and Satire The Positive Conjecture of Fiction Innocence in Satiric Fiction Swift and Madness Select Bibliography Chapter 20: Dramatic Satire Metonymy: 1715–1738 Mimicry: 1739–1770 Metaphor: 1771–1800 Select Bibliography Chapter 21: The Practiceof Parody Species of Parody Parody, Community, and Cultural Capital Select Bibliography Part IV: SATIRICAL OBJECTS Chapter 22: Satirical Objects Systems of Difference Satire’s Objects Satire and Cognition Select Bibliography Chapter 23: Science and Satire The Virtuoso as Victim and Vehicle The Satiric Mode in the Writing of Science Satirizing the Scientific Self Select Bibliography Chapter 24: Against the Experts: Swift and Political Satire Experts in Early Modern Political Writing Walpole and The Craftsman Swift and the Mysteries of Lilliput Swift and Political Satire after 1726 Select Bibliography Chapter 25: The Body of Thersites: Misanthropy and Violence Freedom from the Human Brutal Realism: Satire and the Novel Satire at the Limit: Swift’s Vertiginous Inhumanity The Female Animal Monstrous Heroism Select Bibliography Chapter 26: Self-portraiture The Bashful Muse: Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Thomas The Autobiographical Impulse: Mary Barber, Elizabeth Teft, and Mary Leapor ‘Myself too pictured in a mezzotint’: Mary Jones (1707–1778) Select Bibliography Chapter 27: ‘Little Snarling Lapdogs’: Satire and Domesticity The Evils of Home Tormenting and Tormented Children and Childhood Domesticity and Materiality The Family Pet Select Bibliography Part V: SATIRICAL ACTIONS Chapter 28: Thinking about Satire The Opposition to Satire Dryden and the Art of Satire Pope’s ‘Sacred Weapon’ Addison’s Sociable Wit The Audience for Satire The Subject of Satire The Public and Private Dimensions of Satire Thinking about Satire’s Legacy Select Bibliography Chapter 29: Epigram and Spontaneous Wit Definition and Appreciation Circulation Verse Games Interpreting Court Satire Conclusions Select Bibliography Chapter 30: Satire as Event The Counterfeit’s Example As Dead as Dr Partridge Quiv’ring There Select Bibliography Chapter 31: Legal Constraints, Libellous Evasions Satire and the Law Clandestine Satire Irony, Innuendo, Ambiguity Censorship and the English Stage Wilkes, Churchill, and the 1790s Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 32: Quarrelling ‘Violently Tending to a Decisive Battel’ Glad of a Quarrel The World Being Given to Man for a Subject of Disputation Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 33: Sexing Satire The Touch of Satire Naming, Satiric Fixation, and Desire Lady or Lord Fanny Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 34: Ridicule asa Tool for Discovering Truth Shaftesbury, Ridicule and Gravity Clerical Criticisms of Ridicule Genteel Ridicule Ridicule and the Scottish Enlightenment Conclusion Select Bibliography Part VI: SATIRICAL TRANSITIONS Chapter 35: Moralizing Satire: Cross-Channel Perspectives Boileau Discours au roi ‘Pension’d Boileau’ Dryden Pope The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated To Augustus Conclusion Select Bibliography Chapter 36: Pamela and the Satirists: The Case for Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741) Haywood as an Object of Satire Anti-Pamela as Satire False Forms and True Satire Select Bibliography Chapter 37: The Edge of Satire: Post-Mortem and Other Effects ‘Judge Not, that Ye be Not Judged’ ‘The Single Talent Well Employed’ ‘A Second View of Things Hastily Passed Over or Negligently Regarded’ Select Bibliography Chapter 38: Satire to Sentiment: Mixing Modes in the Later Eighteenth-Century British Novel Sentimental Losses and Satiric Returns Sentimental Vices, Satiric Virtues The Sentimental Knot in the Satiric Lash Select Bibliography Chapter 39: Satire in the Age of the French Revolution ‘What Makes a Libel?’ Liberty’s Last Squeak? Personal Particulars Select Bibliography Chapter 40: Out of Somerset: Or, Satire in Metropolis and Province Out of Somerset Gone to Roost Homage to Elizabeth Hands Select Bibliography Chapter 41: Satire, Morality, and Criticism, 1930–1965 Satire and Biographical Criticism The Satire as a Moral Art The Rhetoric of Satire Satire, Historicism, and Morality Select Bibliography Index 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. This handbook is a guide to the kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century and it focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.