1st Edition
Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England
By Roger D. Lund
Copyright 2012
264 Pages
by
Routledge
264 Pages
by
Routledge
264 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 The Bite of Leviathan; Chapter 2 Libertine Wit and the Collier Stage Controversy; Chapter 3 The Titans of Wit; Chapter 4 Shaftesbury and the Gentility of Wit; Chapter 5 The Trammels of Christian Wit; Chapter 6 The Hermeneutics of Censorship and the Crime of Wit;
Biography
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).
'Alternately feared as an agent of subversion and admired as the begetter of geniality and social cohesion, wit defined eighteenth-century public discourse and evoked cultural anxieties. With encyclopedic erudition, Roger D. Lund lucidly delineates wit's ascendant role during the long eighteenth century.' Anna Battigelli, SUNY Plattsburgh, USA ’Lund provides an impressively rich and nuanced reading of wit and religion in the eighteenth century, making important qualifications to Habermasian and sentimental accounts of publicity, and restoring to Augustan wit some of its bite.’ Review of English Studies ’...a remarkably well-researched and lucidly written study of how the concept of ’wit’ served as a contentious floating signifier in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.’ Notes and Queries '... erudite and compact. The list of primary sources is extensive ... Extensively annotated, richly illustrated with quotations from a wide variety of sources, and innovative in its inclusion of works of philosophy, religious pamphlets and legal writing, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England is an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most characteristic and contentious features of the Augustan period - the decorum and function of witty discourse.' English Studies
