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Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel

Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel

Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel

November 2023
Available
Hardback
9781009274265
$110.00
USD
Hardback
USD
eBook

    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

    November 2023
    Hardback
    9781009274265
    228 pages
    235 × 159 × 20 mm
    0.54kg
    Available

    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.
      Author
    • Olivia Ferguson

      Olivia Ferguson is an editorial consultant, writer and independent scholar based in North East Scotland. She has degrees in Literature and Linguistics from McGill University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Edinburgh. She has published research articles in Studies in Romanticism, Persuasions On-Line, Notes and Queries and Gothic Studies, and has a chapter in the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts. Olivia was a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, in 2018–19, and Lecturer in Romanticism at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2019–20.