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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire: �The Scope in Ev�ry Page�

Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire: �The Scope in Ev�ry Page�

Mannheimer, Katherine

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

HumorLiterary CriticismGeneral Gender Studies

ISBN10: 0415890829
ISBN13: 9780415890823
Publisher: Routledge
Published: May 26 2011
Pages: 248
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This study interprets eighteenth-century satire's famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment's ocularcentric epistemological paradigms, as well as to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly visual - a moment at which widespread attention was being paid, for the first time, to format, layout, and eye-catching advertising strategies. On the one hand, the Augustans were convinced of the ability of their elaborately printed texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers' physical but also moral vision. On the other hand, they feared that an overly scrutinizing gaze might undermine the viewer's natural faculty for candor and sympathy, delight and desire. In readings of Pope, Swift, and Montagu, Mannheimer shows how this distrust of the empirical gaze led to a reconsideration of the ethics, and most specifically the gender politics, of ocularcentrism. Whereas Montagu effected this reconsideration by directly satirizing both the era's faith in the visual and its attendant publishing strategies, Pope and Swift pursued their critique via print itself: thus whether via facing-page translations, fictional editors, or disingenuous footnotes, these writers sought to ensure that typography never became either a mere tool of (or target for) the objectifying gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing.

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