Cutting edges
Subtitle: postmodern critical essays on eighteenth-century satire
By: edited by James E. Gill.
Contributors: Gill, James E., 1935-
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Tennessee studies in literature ;; v. 37
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 438
Subjects: Satire, English -- History and criticism; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Postmodernism (Literature) -- Great Britain; Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
Description: The essays in Cutting Edges examine English satire of the eighteenth century from various theory-based postmodern perspectives. Some examine little-known works that postmodern concerns, such as the role of women and the problems of authorship, have rendered especially interesting; others reconsider familiar works in terms of the latest critical issues.

The justification for these investigations is that both satire and postmodern methods are extremely skeptical and acutely aware that language is always ironic - always pointing to the gap between signifier and signified.

The approaches in this book include those associated with deconstruction, reception theory, Marxist criticism, the new historicism, and various feminist criticisms, and with such theorists as Derrida, Bakhtin, Goux, and Luhmann.

While most of the major figures of eighteenth-century satire - Butler, Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson - are represented here, so too are many other interesting writers - Thomas Shadwell, Fannie Burney, Mary Davys, and Elizabeth Hamilton, to name but a few.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Comedy, satire, or farce? or the generic difficulties of Restoration dramatic satire / Deborah Payne; title: The semiotics of Restoration satire / Rose Zimbardo; title: Ideology, sex, and satire : the case of Thomas Shadwell / Jean Marsden; title: The monster libell : power, politics, and the press in Thomas Otway's The poet's complaint of his muse / Jessica Munns; title: Satiric embodiments : Butler, Swift, Sterne / Richard Braverman; title: The mechanics of transport : sublimity and the imagery of abjection in Rochester, Swift, and Burke / Allen Dunn; title: Credit exhausted : satire and scarcity in the 1690s / Robert Markley; title: Angry beauties : (wo)Manley satire and the stage / Melinda Alliker Rabb; title: The persona as pretender and the reader as constitutional subject in Swift's tale / Brian Connery; title: Pharmakon, pharmakos, and aporetic structure in Gulliver's Voyage to . . . the houyhnhnms / James Gill; title: Mary Davys's satiric novel Familiar letters : refusing patriarchal inscription of women / Lindy Riley; title: Event as text, text as event : reading The rape of the lock / David Wheeler; title: Mocking the heroic? a context for The rape of the lock / Nigel Wood; title: Augustan semiosis / Charles Hinnant; title: Pope and his dunciad adversaries : skirmishes on the borders of gentility / Claudia Thomas; title: The invention of the countryside : Pope, the idiocy of rural life, and the intellectual view from the suburbs / Donna Landry; title: The critique of capitalism and the retreat into art in Gay's Beggar's opera and Fielding's Author's farce / J. Douglas Canfield; title: Blocked observation : tautology and paradox in the Vanity of human wishes / Jonathan Lamb; title: Satire and the bourgeois subject in Frances Burney's Evelina / John Zomchick; title: Goring John Bull : Maria Edgeworth's hibernian high jinks versus the imperialist imaginary / Mitzi Myers; title: Elizabeth Hamilton's modern philosophers and the uncertainties of satire / Janice Thaddeus.