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Ridiculous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment

Ridiculous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment

by Min Wild (Editor), Philip Smallwood (Editor)

  • New

    Illustrated 2016

    $54.11
Synopsis

Ridiculous Critics offers an outline of eighteenth-century literary criticism that questions its image as a civilized practice of cultural refinement and esteem. No longer the equable narrative of texts having consistently serious content and purpose, this history highlights the contempt, jocularity, irony, and buffoonery that equally make up the critical spirit of the period. Laughter's scandalous intrusions and corrections are pertinent today when puritanical solemnities of every kind claim the soul of critical writing.

$54.11

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10 in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 266
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 07 Jun 2016
ISBN 10: 1611486165
ISBN 13: 9781611486162

Media Reviews
There are more books on Augustan satire and Augustan criticism than I can count, but no one has ever bothered to bring the two scholarly discourses together. Smallwood and Wild are the first to explore mockery as a serious critical mode, and their innovative approach brings unfamiliar text to light and lets us see familiar ones from new angles. Ridiculous Critics is essential reading for any student of eighteenth-century criticism or satire-which is to say any student of eighteenth-century literature. -- Jack Lynch, Rutgers University
[The authors] provide a fascinating hybrid collection/anthology on the role of ridicule in criticism produced during the long 18th century. They focus on ridicule of critics/criticism rather than by critics (though sometimes the boundary blurs). In both the critical commentary it offers and the primary texts by the period's ridiculous critics it includes, the volume stands as a history of a body of criticism that has been largely ignored, and which has implications for today's critical practices. In part 1, the editors consider the balance of serious and unserious in English criticism and suggest that a corpus of comic and satirical writings with its own genealogy reveals what criticism was, and should be. In part 2, they provide examples of such writings (and some satirical prints), beginning with Buckingham's Rehearsal and proceeding to satirical jabs by Rochester, Swift, Wycherley, Pope, Parnell, Fielding, Smart, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Sterne, Gibbon, et al. In part 3, the editors suggest that bringing together the laughter of critics [and] their own laughable vices . . . offers a way of being serious about things . . . that serious expression renders trivial, obscure, or ineffective. All who profess themselves literary critics should take a serious look at this book. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. * CHOICE *
Author Bio
Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham University and Honorary Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities at Bristol University, UK. He is the author of various books and essays on the history and theory of modern and eighteenth century criticism. Min Wild's monograph on Smart's Midwife-Christopher Smart and Satire-was published in 2008, and she has recently co-edited an award winning volume of essays on Smart published by Bucknell. She lectures in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and poetry at Plymouth University, UK.