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Each element in the syllogism of the conscience has been tested and found faulty, and each breakdown has been expressed through an alteration in the poet's flesh. Though under Christian theology an enquiry into the body is also an enquiry into the godhead that it images, the form mirrored by the poems is not flawless. In Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, the body is forced into a grotesque shape by the divine pressure to speak. The psychological costs of maintaining a conscience are the aetiolated attitudes of boredom, irony, and opportunistic agreement. They appear in a caricature of a body which is tortured, particulated, involuted, written, on and wrung out. It is thus never wholly the poets' own as it utters someone else's intruded words. Though poems murmur about techniques of control, the devices of grace force disgruntled ejaculations from them. They are more than they mean to say. Such a consciously inadequate use by the poets must shake the position which metaphysical poetry has held for two decades, through Lewalski's scholarly vigour, of being a solely and stoutly Protestant poetics of the Word. Indeed, Stuart writers show that the torques produced by enigma, aposiopesis, subjectio, antanaclasis, and chiasmus engineer the conscience with perhaps a little discomfort in a prosthetic poetics.

This chapter describes the rise of caricature in American newspapers and periodicals during the 19th century, linking this history to technological and economic developments in the printing industry. It explores the popularity of ethnic caricature in particular, especially the vogue for “coon” images in songs and graphic publications during the 1880s and 1890s. The chapter offers examples of graphic caricatures depicting Jews, the Irish, African Americans, Native American, Germans, and representatives of other groups.

This chapter examines William Dean Howells' theoretical defence of realism as a representational mode suited to America's democratic sensibilities. Working with this understanding of realism's social commitments, this chapter attempts to account for Howells's frequent and seemingly contradictory use of ethnic caricatures in his fiction. The discussion focuses on two novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes and An Imperative Duty, as well as Howells' collection of critical essays, Criticism and Fiction, and his Suburban Sketches. It is argued that the democratic politics associated with Howells' realist aesthetic coexist with nativist anxieties that inspire his use of ethnic caricature.

This chapter assesses the exaggerated ethnic imagery Henry James employs in The American Scene in relation to the outlandish racist comedy that appeared in the era's magazines and newspapers. Moving from The American Scene to The Golden Bowl, this chapter argues that a modified logic of ethnic caricature informs James' fictional technique as well. The Golden Bowl's Italian Prince Amerigo and the novel's Jewish antiquarians constitute some of the period's most provocative examples of ethnic caricature.

This chapter explores Edith Wharton's ambivalent attitude toward the social conventions that structure her fictional world. It argues that caricature allows Wharton to challenge categories of class and ethnic organization even as she underwrites their authority more firmly in the realm of ethnic representation. The chapter focuses on Rosedale, the “impossible Jew” of The House of Mirth, and on Lily Bart, herself a caricature of the white woman of fashion.

In this conclusion, I use graphic satires by the likes of James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank, and William Dent as a means of both reaffirming and problematizing Sheridan’s ‘theatrical politics’. Sheridan appeared in close to 500 political caricatures during his life, and a survey of these prints—which frequently appropriated the characters and vocabularies of his own plays, of Shakespeare’s works, and of the pantomime—shows how entrenched tensions between the propriety of parliament and the supposed impropriety of the playhouse provided a constant impediment to Sheridan’s political aspirations. The language of drama deployed in caricatures of Sheridan was powerfully charged with particular social and moral values: theatrical politics becomes, in such graphic satire, a lower-class politics of insincerity.

This chapter develops, in a ‘Baudelairean’ manner, the suggestive quality of the works he admires. Wherever relevant, it also indicates the relationship of the art criticism to his other writings, in particular Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris.

In all French dictionaries, blague means ‘bag’ (from Dutch balg, a sack), and secondarily, a joke. By association, blague came to signify windbag, joker. The blague is polysemous, jack-of-all-trades. Probably his most sustained blague, Vallès began on the slant with his provocative text L'Argent. If rhetoric is the art of persuasion, Vallès's variety is seldom hidden persuasion. To bridge, perhaps shakily, the gap between oblique and straight-up modes of the blague, this chapter passes to sentimentality, which is both head on (it assails our emotions) and devious (it has designs on us). It is the other side of the would-be hard-faced blague. In caricature, that visual blague usually isolates a part of a whole and amplifies it, not always with cruel intent. Black (or sick, gallows, calamity, graveyard, doomsday) humour is thumbscrew humour. In the medical sense, ‘sardonic’ refers to a death-grimace, a rictus. Gallows humour is the last laugh.

Balzac began the Scènes de la vie privée in 1829, the same year when it was just becoming possible to publish short fiction in the press. For all the importance of that first cycle of stories, Balzac’s fiction owes much to his numerous contemporary articles and narratives in four newspapers in particular: La Mode, La Silhouette, La Caricature, and Le Voleur. This chapter shows that writing for the press was to mark a vital new stage in his fiction — to develop his handling of brief articles, of pen-portraits, satire, and the fantastic, within the confines of house style; and, in some of his most dramatic narratives, El Verdugo, Adieu, and Le Réquisitionnaire, to face him with the fitting of fiction to the demands of the press. It would open new horizons, but impose new constraints.

This introductory chapter discusses the literariness of graphic satire. First applied to visual satire in the mid-nineteenth century, the term graphic satire problematically implies a straightforward formal equivalence between the modern editorial cartoon and the political caricature of the Georgian period, which was published and disseminated as a single-sheet etching. However, the fallacy that such images yield their meaning directly and near instantaneously is an old one. To speak of the literariness of caricature is to recognize and attend to its syntactical and narrative structures: structures that are themselves constituted through the enmeshing of images and words; the appropriation and parody of literary scenes and tropes; and often-dense networks of allusions to other cultural texts, practices, and traditions. It is also necessary to acknowledge that a print's meaning and sociopolitical orientation comes into focus only when seen in relation to the cultural constellation of which it was a vital and highly self-conscious constituent.

This chapter examines the satirical print. The single-sheet satirical print was fundamentally a social form; it was designed to be seen, enjoyed, and lingered over by the group far more than the solitary reader. As the sites of display and modes of engagement that structured the culture of caricature make abundantly clear, prints not only invited but were in many ways predicated on practices of communal reading and consumption. Most obviously, the exhibition of engravings, satirical and otherwise, in the shopwindows of London's print sellers—a ubiquitous custom by the midcentury—ensured that prints were part of the texture of everyday pedestrian experience in Georgian London. Equally, within the home, especially the houses of the gentry and aristocracy, graphic satire was principally to be found in the communal space and rituals of the drawing room.

This chapter assesses John Milton's Paradise Lost as a source for graphic satire. The many graphic satirical parodies of Paradise Lost disclose the workings of two different political readings of the poem, readings that respectively function to attenuate and foster rather different conceptions of the Miltonic sublime. The first, and more familiar, regards Milton's epic as an anti-Whig allegory that warns readers of the dangers of opposing the constitutional authority of the sovereign. In contrast to this reading of Paradise Lost, one that looks to it as a political allegory of and for the present, a different and still more complex approach to the poem emerges in a number of James Gillray's mature caricatures. In a manner that is highly idiosyncratic, Gillray seems less interested in conscripting Milton's text as a cautionary tale of rebellion and more concerned with exploiting the generic peculiarities of Paradise Lost for satirical and political effect.

This chapter explores Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a source for graphic satire, specifically considering James Gillray's King of Brobdingnag, and Gulliver (1803). In a parodic reimagining of Part 2, Chapter 7 of Gulliver's Travels, George III, dressed in military uniform, scrutinizes with his spyglass the diminutive, swaggering Napoleon standing on the palm of his outstretched right hand. It is one of the most reproduced and instantly recognizable political caricatures in British history, and it has come increasingly to be entwined in the cultural memory with the very text it adapts. Of course, the efficacy of this 1803 caricature lies in its striking simplicity—the juxtaposition of two profile figures, one small one large, against a plain background—but the question of how it orients itself in relation both to Gulliver's Travels and to the longer history of that text's adaptation and political appropriation is more complex.