The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire Oxford Handbooks Series

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.

Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. Formerly he was a research fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (Voltaire Foundation, 2016). With Timothy Michaels he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.