Enfilade

From Yale UP:

David Francis Taylor, The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0300223750, $50.

This engaging study explores how the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, David Taylor’s book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.

David Francis Taylor is associate professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Warwick and the award-winning author of Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Part One: Prints, Parody, and the Political Public
1  The Literariness of Graphic Satire
2  Looking, Literacy, and the Printshop Window

Part Two: Plotting Politics
3  The Tempest; or, The Disenchanted Island
4  Macbeth as Political Comedy
5  Paradise Lost, from the Sublime to the Ridiculous
6  Gulliver Goes to War
7  Harlequin Napoleon; or, What Literature Isn’t

Appendix: Dramatis Personae
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index