Documenting Eighteenth Century Satire

Documenting Eighteenth Century Satire provides a historicized view of Augustan satire, through detailed readings of individual works. It aims to show how these satires can be “documented” in various ways to reveal richer meanings. The book ranges across different modes of satire, in poetry, prose and drama. It covers some of the best known works of eighteenth-century British literature, including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and The Beggar’s Opera. In addition it deals with less familiar but important texts, including Gay’s Trivia, Pope’s Epistle to Miss Blount, and Swift’s poem on Sid Hamet, as well as works of great literary merit which have been unduly neglected, including Pope’s Duke upon Duke and Swift’s The Bubble. One essay offers the first full interpretation and edition of a poem that surfaced in the 1970s, still virtually unknown, written by Pope and/or Gay. Another describes a previously unsuspected hoax by the Scriblerians on the quest for the longitude, while one more finds an unsuspected, but close, link between poems by Pope and Pushkin. Sources are drawn from numerous unpublished documents (wills, private letters, inventories, estate deeds, marriage contracts and private correspondence). Extensive use is made of contemporary newspapers, magazines and pamphlets. Most of these have not been quarried heavily (if at all) before. Some essays are completely new while others have been extensively revised for this book.

Howard D. Weinbrot here collects thirteen of his most important essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century British satire. Divided into sections on 'contexts' and 'texts', the essays range widely and deeply across the spectrum of satiric kinds, satirists, satires, and scholarly and critical problems. In 'Contexts', Professor Weinbrot discusses the pattern of formal verse satire of blame and praise popularized by Dryden in 1693 and influential throughout the next century, challenges the traditional view that Hprace and 'Augustanism' define eighteenth-century satire, and focuses on the vexed question of whether there was indeed a 'persona' or theory of masking at work in eighteenth-century satire. In 'Texts' he deals with several of the most important verse satirists and satires of the period and closely analyses them within their historical and artistic frameworks. Clearly written, learned, and often witty, this book is committed to critical inquiry that respects the integrity of its texts. It also emphasized the breadth of context that enriches our understanding of satire and the relationships among the nurturing culture, the producing poet, the poem producers, and the poem as received in its age.

Offers new readings of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy by considering its design features alongside broader developments in eighteenth-century book production.

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook not only covers those 'masters and mistresses' of early prose fiction-such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott and Austen-who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently-rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular fiction after 1774, offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

Drawing upon the satirical prints of the eighteenth century, the author explores what made Londoners laugh and offers insight into the origins of modern attitudes toward sex, celebrity, and ridicule.

This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Focusing on the playwriting careers of Henry Fielding, Samuel Foote, and Charles Macklin, the three most controversial and heavily censored satiric dramatists of the century, Disciplining Satire pays particular attention to what type of satiric expression the law encouraged, not just to what it prohibited."--BOOK JACKET.