An anarchist strain runs through Lawrence’s immediate postwar writings, but epistemological idealism in its current manifestations in politics, union activism and educational policy is his real target in his essays of 1918–19 and his play Touch and Go (May 1920). In his poem ‘The Revolutionary’ and in the ‘Fruits’ sequence of poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers a way out of the idealist fog is plotted. Comparison of the two versions of these poems of September 1920, rewritten soon afterwards with idiomatic simplicity and arch comedy, exposes the mind’s capacity to interfere with, to sublimate, the body’s instinctive grasp of a deeper non-idealist world. Count Psanek, a revolutionary in his own way in ‘The Ladybird’ (novella, written December 1921), prosecutes the next of Lawrence’s performative encounters with big ideas stretched across broad intellectual terrain. Those stagings leave us suspended in the void between them, troubled by the undercutting, the ridicule, that the Lawrence protagonists typically attract from their partners and friends, even as their intellectual goal is kept stubbornly alive.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

This chapter opens a perspective onto the more theoretical or conceptual side of humorous discourse in twelfth-century Byzantium by exploring the reflections on ridicule and comedy in Homeric poetry in the commentaries by Eustathios of Thessalonike. Eustathios addresses the social aspects of ridicule, as well as its rhetorical dynamics and its role in narrative. In his view, Homer uses comic elements to counterbalance the gloominess of the Iliad’s war narrative, as a good rhetor should do. Flyting has the same function: even if the addressees in the narrative are stung by such insults, Homer’s primary narratees are expected to be amused by the often humorous verbal abuse. Eustathios repeatedly points to the moral tensions inherent in ridicule and laughter; as the consummate orator, however, Homer always finds a way to keep his dignity intact. Throughout his commentaries, Eustathios offers his target audience of prose writers numerous examples of how to adopt and adapt Homer’s words in order to ridicule certain bodily defects, excessive behaviours or less-than-perfect intellectual skills. Such comments shed light on what was worthy of mockery in the mind of a Byzantine audience and show that it was expected of urbane rhetors to use ridicule in their writings.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.