Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel
What was caricature to novelists in the Romantic period? Why does Jane Austen call Mr Dashwood's wife 'a strong caricature of himself'? Why does Mary Shelley describe the body of Frankenstein's creature as 'in proportion', but then 'distorted in its proportions' – and does caricature have anything to do with it? This book answers those questions, shifting our understanding of 'caricature' as a literary-critical term in the decades when 'the English novel' was first defined and canonised as a distinct literary entity. Novels incorporated caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric to tell readers what different realisms purported to show them. Recovering the period's concept of caricature, Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel sheds light on formal realism's self-reflexivity about the 'caricature' of artifice, exaggeration and imagination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
- Provides a historical and holistic definition of the concept of caricature that serves as an alternative to the largely unexamined and unhistoricised definitions in existing scholarship on the Romantic era
- Clarifies for literary scholars and print historians the historical relationships between pictorial caricature, graphic satire and textual 'caricature' in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Britain
- Provides examples of 'caricature talk' interacting with characterisation technique in several modern genres of the realist novel – comic, historical, horror – and gives insights and analyses relevant to students and researchers in multiple areas of Romantic and nineteenth-century literary studies
Product details
October 2023Adobe eBook Reader
9781009274210
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Part I. Caricature Talk:
- 1. Defining Caricature
- 2. Denying Caricature
- 3. Caricature Talk and the Spectator
- Part II. Novel Caricatures
- Caricature Talk and Characterisation Technique:
- 4. Jane Austen and Anti-Caricature
- 5. Walter Scott and Historical Caricatures
- 6. Mary Shelley, Flesh-caricature and Horrid Realism.