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.
1: Paddy Bullard: Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire
PART I: SATIRICAL ALIGNMENTS
2: Judith Hawley: Corporate Acts of Satire
3: Marcus Walsh: Against Hypocrisy and Dissent
4: George Southcombe: The Satire of Dissent
5: Claudine Van Hensbergen: The Female Wits: Gender, Satire, and Drama
6: David O'Shaughnessy: National Identity and Satire
7: Adam Rounce: Banter, Nonsense, and Irony: Churchill and his Circle
8: Robert W. Jones: Foxite Satire: Politics, Print, and Celebrity
PART II: SATIRICAL INHERITANCES
9: Nicholas Mcdowell: The Double Personality of Lucianic Satire from Dryden to Fielding
10: Matthew C. Augustine: The Invention of Dryden as Satirist
11: Kristine Louise Haugen: Alexander Pope and the Philosophical Horace
12: Daniel Carey: Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire
13: Sophie Gee: Believing and Unbelieving in The Dunciad
14: Matthew Scott: Augustan Romantics
PART III: SATIRICAL MODES
15: Paul Baines: Mixing It: Satire in the Miscellanies, 1680-1732
16: Gillian Wright: Fable and Allegory
17: Bonnie Latimer: Burlesque and Travesty: Pope's Early Satires
18: Jesse Molesworth: Graphic Satire: Hogarth and Gillray
19: Jonathan Lamb: Romance, Satire, and the Exploitation of Disorder
20: Ros Ballaster: Dramatic Satire
21: David Francis Taylor: The Practice of Parody
PART IV: SATIRICAL OBJECTS
22: Sean Silver: Satirical Objects
23: Gregory Lynall: Science and Satire
24: Paddy Bullard: Against the Experts: Swift and Political Satire
25: Helen Deutsch: The Body of Thersites: Misanthropy and Violence
26: Louise Curran: Self-Portraiture
27: Melinda Alliker Rabb: 'Little Snarling Lapdogs': Satire and Domesticity
PART V: SATIRICAL ACTIONS
28: Ashley Marshall: Thinking about Satire
29: Kate Loveman: Epigram and Spontaneous Wit
30: John McTague: Satire as Event
31: Joseph Hone: Legal Constraints, Libellous Evasions
32: Alexis Tadié: Quarrelling
33: Jill Campbell: Sexing Satire
34: Lawrence E. Klein: Ridicule as a Tool for Discovering Truth
PART VI: SATIRICAL TRANSITIONS
35: James Fowler: Moralizing Satire: Cross-Channel Perspectives
36: Jennie Batchelor: Pamela and the Satirists: The Case for Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela
37: Peter Robinson: The Edge of Satire: Post-Mortem and other Effects
38: Lynn Festa: Satire to Sentiment: Mixing Modes in the Later Eighteenth-Century British Novel
39: Jon Mee: Satire in the Age of the French Revolution
40: Carolyn Steedman: Out of Somerset: Or, Satire in Metropolis and Province
41: Clare Bucknell: Satire, Morality, and Criticism, 1930-1965
