Character and Caricature, 1660-1820

Jennifer Buckley, Montana Davies-Shuck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031485121
• eBook ISBN: 9783031485138
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection offers a reappraisal of character as a precondition for caricature and addresses how the two began to merge, becoming increasingly interlinked over the course of the long eighteenth century. It emphasises the need to understand character more fully, arguing that the nuances and origins of caricature can only be appreciated in light of the genre's prehistory and reliance on popular character types. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in approach, the collection makes use of a variety of theories and addresses fiction in its broadest sense, expanding and reconceptualising critical, historical and theoretical discussion of character. Chapters draw from disability studies, cultural materialism, gender studies and the history of sexuality, spatial theory and performance studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Configuring Character and Caricature
• 2. Libertine Character and the Caricature of Debility
• 3. Ninny-broths, Sirreverence, and a Place for Hell: Character Sketches of the Coffeehouse
• 4. “Our satirists prove such very slaughter-men”: The Character of the Satirist in Eighteenth-Century Print
• 5. Aping the French: Foppish Masculinities in the Eighteenth Century
• 6. “himself is as great a curiosity as any in his collection”: Gender, Curiosity, and the Collector as a Character
• 7. The Thrill of the Chaise: Gendering the Phaeton in Eighteenth-Century Literary and Satirical Culture, c.1760–1820
• 8. Staging the Face of De Monfort: Joanna Baillie and the Development of Dramatic Character in De Monfort
• 9. Afterword: “I leave my Character behind me”
• Back Matter