Graphic Satire

Author(s):  
Clare Haynes
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


Ab Imperio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-250
Author(s):  
Kęstutis Šiaulytis
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Helen Pierce

How was the multiplied, printed image encountered in Shakespeare’s London? This chapter examines a range of genres and themes for single sheet, illustrated broadsides in an emerging, specialist print market. It discusses how such images were used to persuade and to entertain a potentially broad cross-section of society along moral, political and religious lines, and according to both topical and commercial interests. The mimetic nature of the English print in both engraved and woodcut form is highlighted, with its frequent adaptation of continental models to suit more local concerns. Consideration is also given to the survival of certain images in later seventeenth-century impressions, indicative of popularity and the common commercial practice of reprinting stock from aging plates and blocks, and the sporadic nature of censorship upon the illustrated broadside.


2018 ◽  
pp. 181-209
Author(s):  
David Francis Taylor

This chapter explores Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a source for graphic satire, specifically considering James Gillray's King of Brobdingnag, and Gulliver (1803). In a parodic reimagining of Part 2, Chapter 7 of Gulliver's Travels, George III, dressed in military uniform, scrutinizes with his spyglass the diminutive, swaggering Napoleon standing on the palm of his outstretched right hand. It is one of the most reproduced and instantly recognizable political caricatures in British history, and it has come increasingly to be entwined in the cultural memory with the very text it adapts. Of course, the efficacy of this 1803 caricature lies in its striking simplicity—the juxtaposition of two profile figures, one small one large, against a plain background—but the question of how it orients itself in relation both to Gulliver's Travels and to the longer history of that text's adaptation and political appropriation is more complex.


2018 ◽  
pp. 40-68
Author(s):  
David Francis Taylor

This chapter examines the satirical print. The single-sheet satirical print was fundamentally a social form; it was designed to be seen, enjoyed, and lingered over by the group far more than the solitary reader. As the sites of display and modes of engagement that structured the culture of caricature make abundantly clear, prints not only invited but were in many ways predicated on practices of communal reading and consumption. Most obviously, the exhibition of engravings, satirical and otherwise, in the shopwindows of London's print sellers—a ubiquitous custom by the midcentury—ensured that prints were part of the texture of everyday pedestrian experience in Georgian London. Equally, within the home, especially the houses of the gentry and aristocracy, graphic satire was principally to be found in the communal space and rituals of the drawing room.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document