Print, visuality, and gender in eighteenth-century satire

Description:

"This study interprets eighteenth-century satire's famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment's "ocularcentric" epistemological paradigms, and to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly "visual"--as the first to pay widespread attention to format, layout, and visual advertising strategies. The Augustans were convinced of the ability of their texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers' physical and moral vision, while at the same time they feared the dangers of an overly-scrutinizing gaze as one that might undermine the viewer's natural faculty for candor, sympathy, delight, and desire. Mannheimer studies this distrust of the empirical gaze, and its applications in print, to the inherent gender politics and broader ethical concerns of ocularcentrism in the works of Montagu, Swift, Pope, and Fielding. These writers sought to ensure that print itself never became either a mere tool of, or an inert object for, the gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing"--

subjects: English literature,  Authors and readers,  LITERARY CRITICISM / General,  SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies,  LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading,  History and criticism,  Criticism and interpretation,  Printing,  English Satire,  Women and literature,  Vision in literature,  English Verse satire,  History,  English literature, history and criticism, 18th century,  Satire, english, history and criticism,  Poésie satirique anglaise,  Histoire et critique,  Littérature anglaise,  Vision dans la littérature,  Écrivains et lecteurs,  Histoire,  Femmes et littérature,  LITERARY CRITICISM,  General,  SOCIAL SCIENCE,  Gender Studies,  Books & Reading,  Satire,  Verssatire,  Englisch,  Wahrnehmung,  Visual perception in literature

People: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745),  Mary Wortley Montagu Lady (1689-1762),  Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Places: Great Britain

Times: 18th century