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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
1:Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire, Paddy Bullard
PART I: SATIRICAL ALIGNMENTS
2:Corporate Acts of Satire, Judith Hawley
3:Against Hypocrisy and Dissent, Marcus Walsh
4:The Satire of Dissent, George Southcombe
5:The Female Wits: Gender, Satire, and Drama, Claudine Van Hensbergen
6:National Identity and Satire, David O'Shaughnessy
7:Banter, Nonsense, and Irony: Churchill and his Circle, Adam Rounce
8:Foxite Satire: Politics, Print, and Celebrity, Robert W. Jones
PART II: SATIRICAL INHERITANCES
9:The Double Personality of Lucianic Satire from Dryden to Fielding, Nicholas Mcdowell
10:The Invention of Dryden as Satirist, Matthew C. Augustine
11:Alexander Pope and the Philosophical Horace, Kristine Louise Haugen
12:Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire, Daniel Carey
13:Believing and Unbelieving in The Dunciad, Sophie Gee
14:Augustan Romantics, Matthew Scott
PART III: SATIRICAL MODES
15:Mixing It: Satire in the Miscellanies, 1680-1732, Paul Baines
16:Fable and Allegory, Gillian Wright
17:Burlesque and Travesty: Pope's Early Satires, Bonnie Latimer
18:Graphic Satire: Hogarth and Gillray, Jesse Molesworth
19:Romance, Satire, and the Exploitation of Disorder, Jonathan Lamb
20:Dramatic Satire, Ros Ballaster
21:The Practice of Parody, David Francis Taylor
PART IV: SATIRICAL OBJECTS
22:Satirical Objects, Sean Silver
23:Science and Satire, Gregory Lynall
24:Against the Experts: Swift and Political Satire, Paddy Bullard
25:The Body of Thersites: Misanthropy and Violence, Helen Deutsch
26:Self-Portraiture, Louise Curran
27:'Little Snarling Lapdogs': Satire and Domesticity, Melinda Alliker Rabb
PART V: SATIRICAL ACTIONS
28:Thinking about Satire, Ashley Marshall
29:Epigram and Spontaneous Wit, Kate Loveman
30:Satire as Event, John McTague
31:Legal Constraints, Libellous Evasions, Joseph Hone
32:Quarrelling, Alexis Tadié
33:Sexing Satire, Jill Campbell
34:Ridicule as a Tool for Discovering Truth, Lawrence E. Klein
PART VI: SATIRICAL TRANSITIONS
35:Moralizing Satire: Cross-Channel Perspectives, James Fowler
36:Pamela and the Satirists: The Case for Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela (1741), Jennie Batchelor
37:The Edge of Satire: Post-Mortem and other Effects, Peter Robinson
38:Satire to Sentiment: Mixing Modes in the Later Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Lynn Festa
39:Satire in the Age of the French Revolution, Jon Mee
40:Out of Somerset: Or, Satire in Metropolis and Province, Carolyn Steedman
41:Satire, Morality, and Criticism, 1930-1965, Clare Bucknell
Index