Satire and Romanticism

S. Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9781349425822
  9780333929926
• eBook ISBN:
  9780312299866
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This remarkable study of the constructive and ultimately canon-forming relationship between satiric and Romantic modes of writing from 1760 to 1832 provides us with a new understanding of the historical development of Romanticism as a literary movement. Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other as the un-Romantic mode. This book argues instead that the two modes mutually defined each other and were subtly interwoven during the Romantic period. By rearranging reputations, changing aesthetic assumptions, and re-distributing cultural capital, the interaction of satiric and Romantic modes helped make possible the Victorian and modern construction of 'English Romanticism'.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Satire and Romanticism
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Representing Rustics: Satire, Countersatire, and Emergent Romanticism
• Chapter 2 “Supernatural, or at Least Romantic”: The Ancient Mariner and Parody
• Chapter 3 Satiric Performance in The Black Dwarf
• Chapter 4 Della Crusca Redivivus: The Revenge of the Satiric Victims
• Chapter 5 Byron’s Satiric “Blues”: Salon Culture and the Literary Marketplace
• Chapter 6 Turning What Was Once Burlesque into Romantic: Byron’s Pantomimic Satire
• Chapter 7 The Wheat from the Chaff: Ebenezer Elliott and the Canon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index