MENMD3SAT: Satire 1693-1752
Credits: 20 credits
Module Director: Dr Peter Merchant
This module aims to introduce students to a range of rich and rewarding texts which in conjunction one with another should conduce to an appropriately ‘joined-up’ understanding of satire in the period under consideration. At the chronological centre of the period, we have the high-water mark of eighteenth-century satire, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Around that text the module arranges a glittering constellation of satirical writings, in both prose and verse, by the writers whose names along with Swift’s have come to define the mode: Pope, Fielding (represented here by Jonathan Wild), and—by special invitation—Voltaire (in English translation, of course). Samuel Johnson will also feature (in a double capacity, like Swift, as an exponent of satire in poetry and fiction alike), and so may Charlotte Lennox. Moreover, since in this period there are scarcely any forms of literary or other artistic production with which satire is not found entwined, the module will take in drama (Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera) and may look at periodical literature (the Spectator essays) and/or social science (Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees) and/or non-literary material (the prints and paintings of Hogarth).
Since satire is generically volatile and crosses all of the period’s major literary ‘kinds,’ the material prescribed for study on this module is remarkably diverse. With that diversity goes a genuine excitement, as the energies of satire are frequently destabilising and work in a dissident direction. For any dangers, however, there is bound to be abundant comic compensation.
Assessment will be by a coursework essay of 2,500 words (50%) and a two-hour closed-book exam (50%).
For further information about this module, please contact Dr Peter Merchant: peter.merchant@canterbury.ac.uk|.