Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792(Law and Literature)

About the Book

Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions. Writers increasingly capitalized on forms of verbal ambiguity, including irony, allegory, circumlocution, and indirection, while shifty printers and booksellers turned to a host of publication ruses that complicated the mechanics of both detection and prosecution. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers' tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire's most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature-acoustic and visual forms that relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or the courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Perils of Satire 1: Keeping out of Court I: Libel and Lampoon after Hale and Dryden 2: Keeping out of Court II: Swift and the Illicit Book Trade 3: Irony in the Courts: Defoe and the Law of Seditious Libel 4: Naming in the Courts: Pope and the Dunciad 5: Allegory in the Courts: Satire and the Problem of 'Libellous Parallels' 6: Keeping out of Court III: Caricature, Mimicry, and the Deverbalization of Satire Epilogue: A Shandean History of the Press

About the Author :
Andrew Benjamin Bricker is an Assistant Professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University and a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He received his BA and MA from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Stanford University. Before joining UGent, he was a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at McGill University and a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia.

Review :
In investigating the mutual shaping of law and literature, Bricker... gives us a new purchase not only on how those works were understood by writers, publishers, purchasers, lawyers, judges, and jurors, but also, indirectly, on the troubled periodization within histories of satire. ... Bricker allows us to see that what have come to be recognized as generic markers of satire are really genetic markers of the struggles early eighteenth-century authors used to evade prosecution. Built on a staggering wealth of archival research and deeply committed to advancing the wide range of scholarly debates within which it is embedded, there is no doubting the scope or magnitude of the contribution this text makes to our understanding of eighteenth-century law, literature and culture. Libel and Lampoon offers up a masterly account, nuanced and incisive, of the unpredictable dynamics through which literary satire and legal protocols came to shape one another following the late seventeenth-century collapse of the licensing system. Andrew Bricker writes with fluency and verve, and he navigates the complexities and dodges of encoded defamation and legal hermeneutics with unfailing vigilance. Grounded in enterprising archival scholarship and skilled interpretation of verbal irony, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on literature and law during the golden age of satire. Andrew Bricker's supple and energetic Libel and Lampoon can be read – and with profit – as an entertaining account of a long game of whack-a-mole, in which courts and comedic expression, lugubrious legality and satiric mockery, chase one another through the presses, pages, pamphlets, and poetry of post-Restoration England, each shaping and reshaping the other in a constant and dizzying display of creative interpretive adaptation. Libel and Lampoon will change the way we think about satire—both its literary history and its generic ambiguity—while revising our understanding of the history of libel law and the freedom of the press more generally. This well-researched, well-written, rigorous and witty book on the complex and symbiotic relationship between satire and the law makes important and original contributions to the study of satire and the field of law and literature. Bricker convincingly demonstrates that satire and the law mutually influenced and shaped one another through a series of thorny skirmishes around questions of meaning and authorial ownership at the heart of Enlightenment thought.