Satire, instruction and useful knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain : the Enlightenment mock arts / Paddy Bullard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bullard, Paddy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Satire, English--History and criticism.

Satire, English.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xx, 257 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction. Enlightenment mock arts and industrial Enlightenment

Daedalus and Proteus : satire and useful knowledge in seventeenth-century England

The Scriblerian mock arts : eighteenth-century satires of didacticism

Anthropologies of the mechanical arts : Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's travels

Ingenuity, industry, experience : eighteenth-century georgic

Manuals of mock arts : The art of ingeniously tormenting and Tristram Shandy

The art of teaching to invent : Maria Edgeworth and the Lunar Society.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Apr 2025).

ISBN:

1-009-46051-X

1-009-46049-8

1-009-46047-1