King George III inherited two legacies from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660: his crown and a tradition of regal satire. As the last British monarch who fully ruled as well as reigned and as the last king of America, George III was the target of constant satiric attacks even before he came to the throne in 1760 and for years after his death in 1820. An interdisciplinary and intercontinental study, this book examines the political satiric poetry and political graphic prints of Britain and Colonial America during the late Georgian period--a tumultuous era that witnessed the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and the birth of the Romantic movement. Using George III as his focal point, Vincent Carretta draws on a wide range of verbal and visual sources to illuminate the development of satire from the work of Charles Churchill and William Hogarth to Lord Byron and George Cruikshank. Extending the argument from his earlier book, The Snarling Muse, which dealt with satire during the first half of the eighteenth century, Carretta demonstrates that the satiric line of descent from the early decades of the 1700s through the 1820s is much more direct than most scholars have recognized. Throughout the book, Carretta examines not only how the monarchy was reflected in satire but how satire in turn may have influenced the regal institution. In the 1790s, for example, British satirists discovered that their earlier attacks on the king for not being kingly enough had brought an unanticipated consequence: they had created the basis for the fictional commoner-king, Farmer George, which the king's supporters used with great rhetorical effectiveness against the threat of revolutionary French ideas. Enhanced by more than 160 illustrations, George III and the Satirists effectively demonstrates how a wide range of materials, verbal and visual, literary and nonliterary, can be marshaled in an interdisciplinary pursuit that crosses conventional fields and periods, repositioning artists and authors who are too often approached outside their original contexts.

Among the most popular writers of the early Soviet period was the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose career spanned nearly four decades and who was as beloved by ordinary people as he was admired by the elite. His most popular pieces, often appearing in newspapers, were "short-short stories" written in a slangy, colloquial style. Typical targets of his satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and what a disdainful Soviet judge in one of the sketches dismisses as "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." Farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts were his favorite devices. Zoshchenko had an uncanny knack for eluding Soviet censorship (one of the sketches even touches humorously on the dangerous topic of party purges) and his work as a result offers us a marvelous window on life in Russia during the twenties and thirties.

Political satire has been a primary weapon of the press since the eighteenth century and is still intimately associated with one of the most important values of western democratic society: the right of individuals to free speech. This study documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when political print became what we would recognise as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, Meredith M. Hale locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III's invasion of England known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe on the events surrounding William III's campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe's satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

"Enjoy this hilarious collection of satires, reviews, news, poems, and short stories from The Satirist: America's Most Critical Journal."--P. [4] of cover.

This book revises assumptions about satire as a public, masculine discourse derived from classical precedents, in order to develop theoretical and critical paradigms that accommodate women, popular culture, and postmodern theories of language as a potentially aggressive, injurious act. Although Habermas places satirists like Swift and Pope in the public sphere, this book investigates their participation in clandestine strategies of attack in a world understood to be harboring dangerous secrets. Authors of anonymous pamphlets as well as major figures including Behn, Dryden, Manley, Swift, and Pope, share at times what Swift called the writer's "life by stealth."