Title: The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period/the Comedy of Romantic Irony
Abstract: THE SATIRIC EYE: FORMS OF SATIRE IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD. Edited by Steven E. Jones. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. pp. 231. ISBN 0-312- 29496-4. £40.00. THE COMEDY OF ROMANTIC IRONY. By Morton Gurewitch. Lanham, New York and Oxford: University Press of America, 2002. ISBN 0-7618-2299-2. $42.00. Both these books are concerned with polarities. The Satiric Eye cites Jerome J. McGann on the 'agonistic strain of Romantic satire' which is counterposed against the conventionally received 'Romantic ideology'. Morton Gurewitch's polarities derive from what one might call 'the school' of Friedrich Schlegel and Gurewitch defines the 'romantic ironist' strictly as one who 'cannot help prizing the idealism he amusingly trashes', and 'cannot help sanctifying exalted aspiration while laughingly dismissing the process of enchantment'. The aim of Jones's miscellany of essays is to reveal the pervasiveness of satiric discourses in the Romantic epoch, especially in popular culture: raree shows, chapbooks, the trade in prints, the Gothic novel, pantomime, even hairdressing. This popular culture affects and penetrates elite forms. We may select essays particularly relevant for readers of Byron. Tim Fulford links an anonymous satire, The Celestial Beds, with the trial of Warren Hastings and the entire issue of 'orientalism'. Marilyn Gaull notes how Keats conceived the idea of 'negative capability' after seeing a pantomime. Developing an argument from Peter Graham, she claims that the transformatory nature of pantomime is linked with figures like Erasmus Darwin and Shelley, and contributed to the democratization and secularization of society. Gary Dyer shows how the pervasive culture of spying, informing and governmental suspicion affects the strategies of Moore as a satirist of the establishment, while Kyle Grimes examines parodic devices in Hone, for instance his use of Don Juan. Gurewitch's concern is theoretical and is concerned with European high culture. His strict definition of romantic irony leads him to distinguish it both from the scepticism of 'Pyrrhonic irony' and from reformist satire. The particular aim is to trace the ironist's divided psyche (which, mutatis mutandis, is clearly seen in the Renaissance) through a substantial body of major Romantic and post-Romantic authors: Byron and Carlyle, Hoffman and Heine, Gautier, Musset and Stendhal, Lermontov, Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Baudelaire and Flaubert (but, perplexingly, not Goethe's Faust). Both books depend upon the cumulative effect of multiplying examples. Jones's symposium relies upon an empirical historical method, snapshots of street scenes in London as it were, and then a process of argumentative osmosis: for instance, see how popular theatre is in dialectic dialogue with high art or major events. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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