We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.
At the heart of this volume is the opposition between two terms, corroding and binding, between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to subvert authority and confront iniquity while also solidifying communities of readers. Nowhere was this opposition more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the golden age of English satire, between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the deaths of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope in the middle of the eighteenth century. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a second philosophical dispute also opened up on the margins of literary, sociological and psychological theory about the nature and function of laughter. Both sides of these debates were eagerly and antagonistically argued: satirists were high-minded public moralists or they were vindictive lampooners; laughter was a form of splenetic superiority or merely a pleasing response to an innocuous incongruity.
This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice – either the vices of the satiric victim or those of the reader. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Richard Morton has offered the pithiest articulation of this thesis: ‘The aim of satire was reformation through perceptive ridicule. The satirist saw what was wrong with the world; the reader reciprocated by agreement and amendment.’ Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts, both then and today, that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. Readers might have laughed at satiric works and their victims, but many questioned whether those chortles so readily translated into an easily imbibed lesson or practical self-correction.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.