|
The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century
Satire Edited
by Paddy Bullard
Oxford Handbooks Series Oxford: University
Press, 2019 Hardcover. xxiii + 719 pages. ISBN 978-0198727835. £110
Reviewed by Baudouin Millet. Université Lumière Lyon 2
While the
critical literature on the eighteenth-century British novel keeps proliferating
in England and elsewhere, the genre (or mode) of satire in eighteenth-century
Britain has recently received much less critical attention than it deserves,
even though that period is still significantly called in our times “the age of
satire”. Paddy Bullard is the editor of this Oxford Handbook of
Eighteenth-Century Satire, which is aimed at researchers and advanced
students. Its forty-one chapters are signed by authoritative and often famous
scholars in the field, and offer a broad critical synthesis on the large output
of satirical writings in the eighteenth century—which this book helps
redefining—from Dissenting writings to drama and Revolutionary satire. This
collection of essays could be read as a very useful complement to (though it is
more than twice as substantial as) the Cambridge Companion to the
Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited in 1996 by John Richetti, albeit with a
different mode of presentation and subdivisions. Whereas Richetti’s chapters are
chronologically centred on specific literary figures of the times (Defoe,
Swift, Richardson, Fielding, etc), Bullard has chosen to present thematic units
(or “parts”): “satirical alignments,” “satirical inheritances,” “satirical
modes,” “satirical objects,” “satirical actions,” and “satirical transitions.” These
subdivisions allow the editor to integrate recent scholarship on women and
gender writings (chapter 5: “The Female Wits: Gender, Satire, and Drama”,
by Claudine van Hensbergen; chapter 33: “Sexing satire”, by Jill Campbell),
or literature and the law (“Legal Constraints, Libellous Evasions”, by Joseph
Hone). The period covered is the “long” eighteenth century, spanning from the
Restoration to the beginnings of the Romantic period. Each chapter is followed by
a short but useful select bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject,
which sometimes unfortunately ignores some important earlier contributions: one
may regret the absence of bibliographical references to or discussion of Claude
Rawson’s Satire and Sentiment ([1994], Yale University Press, 2000), in
a chapter by Lynn Festa, entitled “Satire to Sentiment”, whose corpus
intersects with Rawson’s study. The non-monographic
and non-chronological perspective allows the editor to cover a variety of
different satirical sub-genres, such as epigram, burlesque, satirical allegory,
satirical science, and to confront the idea of satire with endogenous or
exogenous notions, such as misanthropy, quarrelling, morality or domesticity.
This editorial perspective, on the other hand, makes it difficult to get
unified views of particular authors—although a useful index of names and works
(and, very selectively, of notions) allows the readers to find their ways through
the articles of the handbook. Unfortunately,
there are no specific chapters on important women satirists of the early
eighteenth century such as Delarivière Manley, or on the influence of French
satirists like Boileau on the British satire of the period; Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela,
however, is duly represented in a chapter by Jennie Batchelor entitled “Pamela
and the Satirists : The Case for Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela
(1741)”. Aside with Dryden, Pope and Fielding, Swift understandably receives
acute attention, with two articles on that author and his favourite satirical
genres: “Swift, Gulliver and Travel Satire” by Daniel Carey, and “Against the
Experts : Swift and Political Satire” by Paddy Bullard. Carey’s article
singles out Gulliver’s Travels (1726) among the other pieces of prose
writing by Swift, and concentrates on the wide range of its satirical targets,
among which is the genre of the travel book, “serving as a vehicle as well as a
subject matter for satirical treatment”. Carey argues that Swift “makes the
form of travel writing collapse in on itself” [193-194]. Bullard similarly
focuses on Swift’s prose satire and that of his contemporaries, to point to the
lack of faith in the satirists of the period in the effectiveness of the
satirical genre as an instrument of political improvement. Building on Bertrand
Goldgar’s still useful contribution Walpole and The Wits (1976), and on
an acute knowledge of the English political culture of the 1720s, Bullard
studies the relation of politics and literature in Swift’s satirical writings
to show that Swift is more than a mere polemicist: “In Gulliver he seeks
to restrain satire’s tendency towards the grotesque and fantastic, towards
allegories that are too exuberant, and towards ironies that cannot be resolved”
[419]. This much-needed
and very substantial volume of 719 pages is a valuable introduction to the
diversity and complexity of satirical writings in the British neo-classical
period. It not only offers new views of canonical authors of the genre, but
also brings to the fore the recent developments of the research on that ever-widening
field of studies.
All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
