Taking as its starting point a little-known text by George Buck entitled The Third Universitie (1615) and as its endpoint the early years of the Royal Society, this chapter explores seventeenth-century knowledge exchange, research networks and innovation. What began as a civic challenge to Oxbridge ended in an outward-facing institutional sphere that drew its inspiration, founding figures and key personnel from the archipelagic and colonial contexts within which its pioneering interests developed. The Royal Society’s origins lie in a range of institutions identified by Buck, including Gresham College; in later developments such as the Invisible College and the Hartlib Circle; and in the idea for a directory of expertise, or ‘Office of Address’. Colonial investors and adventurers hard-wired into emerging networks of experts working across collaborative communities of scholar-practitioners ensured the advancement of knowledge was intimately intertwined with political intelligence and economic exploitation. There was no new medicine without frontiers, no new husbandry without fresh fields to plant, and, crucially, no knowledge exchange without satire.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.

This chapter deals not with a single form or genre, but with the satiric, invective or humourous use of several. As it happens, the patterns of previous scholarship have proved particularly distorting in relation to Anglo-Latin satiric verse, with neo-Latin scholars tending to focus on Renaissance versions of the classical Roman genre of hexameter satire, typically interpreted in terms of ‘Horatian’ vs ‘Juvenalian’ (less often Persian) style. In England, however, there were almost no examples of this genre of satiric verse until the early eighteenth century. This chapter takes a different approach, attempting to survey the various ways in which Anglo-Latin verse of various genres and forms functioned as satire or invective, focusing in particular on satiric epigram, iambic verse, rhyming verse and various kinds of 'free' or experimental poetry. In this way, the chapter offers a guide to the main ways in which Latin verse was used for humourous, satiric and invective purposes in early modern England, with attention to changing patterns over time.

Scholars have heeded Nietzsche’s instruction that we should think of TSZ as a kind of parody, but there has been a great deal of uncertainty about what exactly he means by this. Zavatta helpfully clears up the debate by surveying the genres of literary and musical parody prior to Nietzsche’s time and showing how he appropriated these genres in TSZ so as to invent a new form of philosophical critique.

All the conspirators could read, and most could write, more or less. Radical newspapers and tavern trade clubs and societies provided their political education. ’Low’ radicals in regency London were as deeply influenced by the agrarian socialist Thomas Spence as by Tom Paine, but, either way, their values drew on Enlightenment. They believed in the people’s right to resist oppression, and some hoped for the redistribution of landed property throughout the kingdom. Spence propagated his ideas through slogans, songs, graffiti, and tokens as well as pamphlets and books; and after his death in 1814 they were propagated through the Society of Spencean Philanthropists and Wedderburn’s ‘chapel’ in Soho, to both of which key conspirators belonged.

In Chapter 5, Lucian (c. second century CE) presents a complicated model of difference that relies unevenly on skin color, attire, and language as determinants of identity. His trio of Scythian satires features characters who rework the relationships between race and identity within their specific contexts. The categories of “Greek” and “foreigner” become muddled as Greeks and Scythians share their impressions about black people in their midst: Greeks conflate blackness with Aithiopians or liken it to their own appearance with ease, while one Scythian man marvels at the sight of black Athenian athletes. These varied observations lead to a collective questioning of blackness in relation to Greek identity under the guise of humor.

Satire is often thought to differ in spirit or function from libel, defamation, gossip, and scandal. Many of the traditional ways scholars have defined satire – as a serious, high-minded mode focused on moral reform – enforce this distinction: the more frivolous and gossipy a satire is, the less it appears to be satire. This essay considers Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire, The Epics of the Ton; or, The Glories of the Great World (1807), a poem that challenges the traditional distinction between satire and gossip. Rare among satires in conceding its reliance on gossip, Hamilton’s poem surveys the sexual misdeeds of London’s fashionable classes, cloaking the identities of the targets. In presenting satire as a mode of printed gossip, Epics confounds the usual gender associations of satire. The poem contests the view, since John Dryden at least, of satire as a public, “manly” mode far removed from the furtive, gossipy genres associated with women, such as secret history and roman à clef. Hamilton uses the cloaked identities in her poem to replicate the play of gossip, where one scandalous tale ensnares many victims. By inviting identification of targets, Hamilton entraps readers into creating the gossip that is supposedly antithetical to satire.

Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) combines the reforming strategies of satire, conduct writing, and fable. The collision of these forms creates a fabular hybrid, a text in which fabular elements are folded into the generic markers of the conduct book, resulting in an intensification of the satire of conduct writing and infusing it with a moral claim. In the preface to her excoriating exposure of the abuses of power in domestic life, Collier applauds Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants for its “ingenuity,” the descriptor she applies to her own manual, and the text bears comparison to the Scriblerian project with its satire of both medium and message. The three sections into which Ingeniously Tormenting is divided emphasize the satire of the conduct book. The concluding fable of the Lion, the Leopard, the Lynx, and the Lamb, however, forces a rereading of Ingeniously Tormenting and points to John Gay’s fables. When references to animals, teeth, and claws to describe human behavior are echoed in the real teeth and claws of the animals in the fable, the essay’s tone darkens. The fable’s placement at the end of the book reflects the ironic inversion characteristic of satire.

In her poetry, Anne Finch employs fable to simultaneously distance herself from abusive satire, which she associates with lampoon, and produce reformative satire, or satire that addresses the shortcomings of society more generally in an effort to bring about the improvement of the culture-at-large. In spite of her purported aversion to lampoonery, however, Finch represents within several of her verse fables figurative satirists who abuse their targets without seeking to reform them. She does so not with a censorious tone designed to encourage readers’ disapproval but in a manner that emphasizes the figurative satirists’ pleasure, pleasure that emerges largely from reversals of power. Finch not only invites the reader to participate in this pleasure but appears to do so herself. As a writer of satirical fables, Finch engages critically with questions regarding what satire should be. At the same time, a number of her fables suggest her desire to engage in satire as she wishes it could be: an empowering personal attack with no repercussions.

Modern scholars have achieved consensus that Frances Burney was writing satire in her novels, acknowledging the range of Burney’s satiric targets and tones, and the merging and submerging of her satire with comedy, irony, melodrama, and sentimentalism. Yet Burney’s contemporary reviewers did not identify Burney as a satirist. In fairness, satire defies easy definition, and the status of satiric fiction when Burney was writing at the end of the eighteenth century was far less secure than at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, satire was gendered as male at the time; women were seen as the targets of satire, not its practitioners. So even when Burney’s reviewers and readers did recognize satiric elements in her work, she was seen as a sentimental novelist, a didactic novelist, a romantic novelist – as anything but a satirist. And Burney did not identify herself as a satirist either. In doing so, Burney was passing – hiding in plain sight as a satirist, defying the conventions of women writers and novelists of her time.

The chapter discusses Mary Robinson’s use of the spectator as a controlling satiric device in The Sylphid – a series of satirical essays published in the pages of the Morning Post 29 October 29, 1799 and January 31, 1800 which aim to expose the artificiality of society and ridicule contemporary fashions and characters. Scholarship on Robinson’s persona in The Sylphid has emphasized its importance in promoting Robinson as a free-ranging flâneuse, thus offering an alternative to the male gaze by challenging its authority and asserting the power of the female gaze. However, Sylphid’s gaze is not necessarily divested of the properties of the male gaze. The essay argues that Robinson employed the chief attributes of the spectator to construct her satirical persona: that is, the claim to objectivity, the properties of invisibility and shape-shifting, as well as the surreptitious surveillance of society whose secrets and flaws the spectator makes public knowledge. Figuring the spectator as an invisible spy not only helped Robinson advance her social satire and blur the boundaries between private and public, but also positioned her within the literary tradition of other satirical spectators, which further cemented her authority as a satirist.

Eighteenth-century women writers excelled in the formal satiric style associated by contemporaries with the Roman poet Horace. While formal verse satire was especially fashionable in mid-century, two accomplished poets illustrate the rise and decline of this phenomenon. Anne Finch (1661–1720), writing at the beginning of the satiric vogue, professed to hate satire but incorporated corrective criticism into many poems; she wrote only one formal verse satire and kept it in manuscript. Anna Seward (1742–1809), who identified herself as a poet of sensibility, wrote satirically in prose but rarely produced formal satiric verse. Like Finch, Seward kept her sole formal satiric poem in manuscript until authorizing its posthumous publication. Finch exemplifies how a woman might hesitate to write in the Roman style because Restoration satire was a “masculine” poetic form associated with classical education, public affairs, and personal invective. Seward illustrates why a late-century poet might have moved away from formal verse satire despite a predilection for its tone and purpose. Both poets show how women readily adapted the poetic fashions of their lifetimes to suit their satiric purposes.

This essay examines Charlotte Lennox’s satirical poetry in her collection of thirty poems in Poems on Several Occasions (1747). Many of these poems were republished between 1750 and 1785 in periodicals and miscellanies, such as The New Foundling Hospital of Wit, published in England and America. I argue that Lennox’s targets were frequently the social systems designed to restrict women’s influence to domestic settings. At a time when elements of participatory democracy were gaining global traction and when many political poems engaged with social unrest, Lennox wrote, “Satire, like a magnifying Glass, may aggravate every Defect, in order to make its Deformity appear more hideous.” Lennox’s amplifying attention to the dominant culture’s method of entrapping women and her advocacy for participatory democracy are informed by her exposure as a preteen with Scottish and Irish parents to a diverse range of national and racial backgrounds, including Mohawks, Hurons, Iroquois, Africans, Dutch, and French residents, in Albany and Schenectady, New York. She uses satiric poetry to cast an accusing light on unjust power structures and to promote democratic aims by alluding to the belief that the power of the government is vested in all those who are governed.

Contempt, cursing, and defamation all actively caused harm to others and threatened to destabilize social hierarchies of gentility. As politeness became the political language that enabled the exercise of power by elites and allowed them to recognize each other as the rightful possessors of public authority, criminal prosecutions of uncivil speech helped define political roles and relationships. Contempt prosecutions punished impolite speech from the lower orders, but the law also rewarded appropriately submissive speech (such as apologies) from them. The fact that these negotiations occurred exclusively among men reflects how both the politeness regime and the king’s peace itself were increasingly marginalizing women. The vast majority of those prosecuted for cursing were men of relatively low social status; this offense was understood to threaten the polite ethos and the civil order. Defamation became in the eighteenth century a crime of the lower orders, while polite gentlemen channeled their own defamatory impulses into a highly specific and legally protected written form: satire.

This chapter argues that, even before Swift, Defoe’s satire employed the strategy of identifying admirable traits in the satirized object, which implicates both the thing itself and those who already see themselves as morally superior to the thing under attack. Defoe's deadpan satires work to more slowly build the ironic tension to the point that a new perspective suddenly and disruptively makes its presence felt; that the ironic status of this presence is also sometimes doubtful, indeterminate, or uncertain simply strengthens its effects. Defoe’s most famous satire, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, predicts A Modest Proposal, not just by using extremist rhetoric but also by suggesting that an earnest engagement can be much more subversive than cynical manipulation. Defoe satirizes the practice of occasional conformity by showing that it engages the Church in a purely cynical way. Like Swift later, Defoe seriously engages with the ideology of his target, in this case the Tory bigot, whose hostility to Dissenters also leads him to reveal the key insight of the satire: if Dissenters are willing to conform occasionally, there is no reason not to enforce conformity permanently.

Rather than understanding irony as the simple opposite of earnestness, sincerity, or genuineness, I want to suggest that it represents a mode of playful engagement with the hidden connective tissue that links the various commitments – serious or flippant, affirmative or destructive, quiescent or contentious – of a work, object, or discourse. Irony activates the latent trace of the one in the other, demonstrating how each of these serve ulterior motives beyond their stated purpose. Earnestness in turn can intensify its credibility and seriousness of purpose by confronting and working through the contradictions and tensions that ironic scrutiny exposes. A discourse or ideology is defined not only by what it values but also by what it attacks and rejects, by what it finds beautiful as well as by what it finds amusing, silly, or ridiculous. Irony activates, interrogates, and reorganizes the different possible combinations and permutations of commitments that organize any value system.

This chapter explores the ironic and contentious potential of sympathy, in particular the manner in which slight differences in earnest commitments can create polemic relationships just as charged as those that stem from deeper ideological rifts. I focus on Swift and his interactions with hack writer John Dunton. The two writers, I argue, do not disagree about what they dislike, but rather have slightly different, though equally genuine, commitments to the same religious and political institutions. Scholars have seen Swift and Dunton as writers who are representative of the ironic and earnest styles, respectively. While Dunton’s work often lacks the same level of irony or self-awareness as Swift’s, it was still often subversive or duplicitous in a way that was amenable to Swift and that first attracted Swift to his writing. Drawing on Adam Smith, I suggest that this relationship reveals how interests and affects are inseparable from communal relationships and social groupings that are inherently factional and fractious. In Smith's account, any affective state is a combination of a judgment and a social identification: it is always positional and partial.

The Epilogue argues that a collary of the book's thesis is that earnestness and credulity are not the same thing: the satires of Swift and Defoe reveal that credulous investment in even apparently authentic beliefs need not be earnest. This remains true regardless of whether there is a rigorous factual basis for such beliefs: the same bad faith can power both the most rigorous research as well as the most baseless conspiracy theorizing. A second corollary is therefore that such credulity need not be naïve or unreflective but can instead demonstrate both self-awareness and a deep cynicism, in the same way that Hutcheson’s moral sense is simultaneously an automatic and instantaneous process yet also one that reflects, upon further investigation, a kind of reasoning.

This chapter argues that Swift’s darkest satires blur the boundary between irony and earnestness. I suggest that Swift’s satire aims to vex as much through earnest engagement as through confrontation. What is most troubling about Swift’s difficult work is not the contempt, disdain, or disgust for the world he inspires in his readers, but rather the compelling intimacies it sustains with things that are disdainful, disgusting, or otherwise problematic. I examine the points of agreement between Swift’s most famous satires and the work of moral-sense philosopher Francis Hutcheson, showing that, in works like A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, Swift does not simply degrade or denude his satiric target, but indulgently hyperbolizes it, raising it to the impossible standard of what Hutcheson calls “disinterested malice.” Hutcheson suggests that this construct, which consists in a deliberate delight in cruelty for its own sake rather than for the sake of any self-interest or gain, is imaginable but not possible. Swift’s satire functions by restoring this ethical potential lost in the actualization.