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King George III inherited two legacies from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660: his crown and a tradition of regal satire. As the last British monarch who fully ruled as well as reigned and as the last king of America, George III was the target of constant satiric attacks even before he came to the throne in 1760 and for years after his death in 1820. An interdisciplinary and intercontinental study, this book examines the political satiric poetry and political graphic prints of Britain and Colonial America during the late Georgian period--a tumultuous era that witnessed the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and the birth of the Romantic movement. Using George III as his focal point, Vincent Carretta draws on a wide range of verbal and visual sources to illuminate the development of satire from the work of Charles Churchill and William Hogarth to Lord Byron and George Cruikshank. Extending the argument from his earlier book, The Snarling Muse, which dealt with satire during the first half of the eighteenth century, Carretta demonstrates that the satiric line of descent from the early decades of the 1700s through the 1820s is much more direct than most scholars have recognized. Throughout the book, Carretta examines not only how the monarchy was reflected in satire but how satire in turn may have influenced the regal institution. In the 1790s, for example, British satirists discovered that their earlier attacks on the king for not being kingly enough had brought an unanticipated consequence: they had created the basis for the fictional commoner-king, Farmer George, which the king's supporters used with great rhetorical effectiveness against the threat of revolutionary French ideas. Enhanced by more than 160 illustrations, George III and the Satirists effectively demonstrates how a wide range of materials, verbal and visual, literary and nonliterary, can be marshaled in an interdisciplinary pursuit that crosses conventional fields and periods, repositioning artists and authors who are too often approached outside their original contexts.
Defining John Bull demonstrates that caricature played a vital role in the redefinition of what it meant to be British. The public's increasing interest in political controversies meant that satirists turned their attention to individuals and the issues involved. This long reign was marked by political crises, both foreign and domestic and caricaturists responded with an outpouring of work that led the era to be called the 'golden age' of caricature. These multitudinous prints, produced in response to public demands and sensitive to public attitudes, indicate the redefinition of existing ideals.
Prepare to be shocked. From the man The Wall Street Journal hailed as a "Swiftean satirist" comes the most shocking book ever written! The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, by award-winning fake journalist Andy Borowitz, contains page after page of "news stories" too hot, too controversial, too -- yes, shocking -- for the mainstream press to handle. Sample the groundbreaking reporting from the news organization whose motto is "Give us thirty minutes -- we'll waste it."
Satire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.
Beautiful antique embroidery patterns, re-purposed into 15 modern sewing projects, are complemented by lively historical features, quotes from Jane Austen's letters and novels, enchanting illustrations, clear instructions, and inspirational project photography.
Part of The New Penguin Shakespeare series, this text looks at The Winter's Tale with an introduction, a list of further reading, commentary and a short account of the textual problems of the play. The series is used and recommended by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared. Thomas Curley's Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts. Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, Rasselas, not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.