Taking some cues from cognitive analyses of the emotions, this project studies how the major Scriblerian satires of the early Eighteenth Centuy function as containers for the spectacular dissent, focusing particularly on the way they deploy laughter to channel anger, contempt, and disgust.
'Idol-Worship or the way to preferment', Satire with a man climbing to kiss the bare backside of the giant figure of Walpole: see BMSat for full description. 1740 Etching. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. See full image here.
This project studies how the major Scriblerian satires of the early eighteenth century – Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Horatian epistles, Gay’s ballad operas – function as containers for the spectacular dissent, focusing particularly on the way they deploy laughter to channel anger, contempt, and disgust. In an under-recognised element of satire is the way it often permits author and audience to find a way of living with the object attacked.
A larger argument is that this satirical accommodation has political consequences of a more paradoxical nature than has often been recognized. One of the things that happened during the long eighteenth century in Britain was the development of robust and more-or-less tolerated public dissent against the current regime. The attacks on the Walpole government in the 1720s and 1730s provide a crucial stage in this process. Satires like these may have had some direct impact on policy, but it is the emotional effects of catharsis – of venting and containing potentially rebellious emotions – that needs further analysis for a literary history of political emotions.
Publications:
Kerr, H., D. Lemmings and R. Phiddian, eds. Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Phiddian, R. ‘Spectacular Opposition: Suppression, Deflection, and the Performance of Contempt in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Polly’. In The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500–1820, edited by M. Knights and A. Morton, pp. 133–51. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017.
