Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime鈥檚 perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fascinating and unusual literature across the full chronological horizon. In State of Ridicule, Dan Sperrin provides the first ever longue dur茅e history of political satire in British literature. He traces satire鈥檚 many extended and discontinuous trajectories through time while also chronicling some of the most inflamed and challenging political contexts within which it has been written.
Sperrin begins by describing the Roman foundations and substructures of British satire, paying particularly close attention to the core Roman canon: Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He then proceeds chronologically, populating the branches of satire鈥檚 family tree with such figures as Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Dickens, as well as a whole series of writers who are now largely forgotten. Satire, Sperrin shows, can be a literature of explicit statements and overt provocation鈥攂ut it can also be notoriously indirect, oblique, suggestive, and covert, complicated by an author鈥檚 anonymity or pseudonymity. Sperrin meticulously analyses the references to transient political events that may mystify the contemporary reader. He also presents vivid and intriguing pen portraits of the satirists themselves along the way. Sperrin argues that if satire is to be contended with and reflected upon in all its provocative complexity鈥攁nd if it is to be seen as anything more than a literature of political vandalism鈥攖hen we must explore the full depth and intrigue of its past. This book offers a new starting point for our intellectual and imaginative contact with an important and fascinating kind of literature.
Dan Sperrin is research fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, who specialises in literary and graphic satire of the long eighteenth century. He is also a political cartoonist at The London Magazine and elsewhere.
"[A] thoughtful, thorough and often enlightening book."鈥擥raham McCann, Society
"Dan Sperrin has produced an erudite survey of English political satire from the early Middle Ages to the present day. It is a book for anyone who wishes to understand the obscure, politically charged and highly allusive nature of the most vexing literary genre in the canon."鈥擩ane Cooper, Times Literary Supplement
"Studies of satire don’t usually take in such a large scope, and Sperrin’s book, beginning with the Romans and ending in the 2010s, is most praiseworthy for its sheer ambition and erudition."鈥擜aron Matz, New York Review of 快色直播
“If I had read Dan Sperrin’s book before setting out to make Spitting Image, the TV satirical puppet show, it certainly would have been a much sharper instrument with which to attack Mrs. Thatcher's politics.”—Roger Law, Cocreator of Spitting Image
“This book is a tour de force—breathtakingly erudite and wide-ranging, and a pleasure to read. What emerges is a portrait of an endlessly evasive, allusive, and adaptable mode of literature whose contours only come into focus when closely analysed against their immediate political context. That close analysis is delivered brilliantly by Sperrin.”—Henry Power, University of Exeter
“A remarkable achievement, lucid, comprehensive, and balanced. There is no existing book that offers a comparable sense of the breadth and depth of political satire. State of Ridicule is useful and authoritative and hugely capacious—a magisterial survey.”—Sophie Gee, 快色直播 University
“State of Ridicule is a work of tremendous ambition, erudition, and formidable interpretive muscle. Combining chronological sweep with revisionist sensitivity to the minutiae of context and contingency, Sperrin has pulled off a heroic feat of literary history.”—Joseph Hone, author of The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers
“In this monumental book, Sperrin displays an astounding grasp of the dynastic and ministerial politics that give a fine-grained context to many satires. The powers of satirists to project, redirect and counterclaim, and their occasional collapse into vague, underpowered or peripheral critique are revealed in dozens of acute readings of canonical and noncanonical writers. Sperrin has produced a true history of his subject, its rhetorical achievements and its lost opportunities.”—Tom Jones, author of George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life
