Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England
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A01=Roger D. Lund
Apt Similitude
Augustan Wit
Author_Roger D. Lund
blasphemous
Blasphemous Libel
Case Western Reserve University
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
Category=N
Category=NHAH
Category=NHTB
censorship history
Christian Wit
Collier's Short View
Collier’s Short View
Common Language
daniel
eachard
eighteenth-century satire
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Foolish Talking
Fox's Libel Act
Fox’s Libel Act
Green Sickness
heterodox
Heterodox Writers
Hobbes's Contemporaries
Hobbes's Description
Hobbes's Manner
Hobbes's Rhetoric
Hobbes’s Contemporaries
Hobbes’s Description
Hobbes’s Manner
Hobbes’s Rhetoric
john
John Eachard
libel
libertine
Libertine Wit
political pamphleteering
public sphere theory
Rehearsal Transpros
religious polemics
Religious Ridicule
reprint
Restoration literature
Restoration Stage
society
subversive rhetorical strategies in England
Swift's Parody
Swift’s Parody
Theological Lying
William III
William King
writers
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781409437796
- Weight: 612g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Apr 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.
Roger D. Lund is Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY. He is editor of The Margins of Orthodoxy (1995) and Gulliver's Travels: A Sourcebook (2006).
