Satire, Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Enlightenment Mock Arts

Paddy Bullard

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009460491
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Long before the Industrial Revolution was deplored by the Romantics or documented by the Victorians, eighteenth-century British writers were thinking deeply about the function of literature in an age of invention. They understood the significance of 'how-to' knowledge and mechanical expertise to their contemporaries. Their own framing of this knowledge, however, was invariably satirical, critical, and oblique. While others compiled encyclopaedias and manuals, they wrote 'mock arts'. This satirical sub-genre shaped (among other works) Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Edgeworth's Belinda. Eighteenth-century satirists and poets submitted to a general paradox: the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. As a result, their explorations of mechanical expertise eschewed useable descriptions of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Enlightenment Mock Arts and Industrial Enlightenment
• Chapter 2 Daedalus and Proteus: Satire and Useful Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century England
• Chapter 3 The Scriblerian Mock Arts: Eighteenth-Century Satires of Didacticism
• Chapter 4 Anthropologies of the Mechanical Arts: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels
• Chapter 5 Ingenuity, Industry, Experience: Eighteenth-Century Georgic
• Chapter 6 Manuals of Mock Arts: The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting and Tristram Shandy
• Chapter 7 The Art of Teaching to Invent: Maria Edgeworth and the Lunar Society
• Notes
• Index