Print Culture in the 1790s - CES00009M

«Back to module search

  • Department: Centre for 18th Century Studies
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: M
  • Academic year of delivery: 2022-23

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Spring Term 2022-23

Module aims

  • to introduce students to the best of late eighteenth-century political satire and other forms of print politics, by both 'high' and 'low' authors
  • to explore that satire in the context of the political culture of Britain in the decade of the French Revolution.
  • to introduce students to the skills and techniques of interdisciplinary research

Module learning outcomes

Subject content

  • the varieties of political satire and other forms of print politics, their different social registers, and the different media in which they were published
  • the relationship between these forms and other more 'literary' kinds of print, including, for instance, the literary ballad as against popular song
  • a grasp of the some of the main political events and political conflicts in the period which became the occasions for the production of satires
  • an awareness of the relations between patrician politics and plebeian culture

·

Academic and graduate skills

  • the research skills to elucidate political satires in connection with parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, political pamphlets and caricatures
  • some grasp of the range of print cultures in late eighteenth-century Britain

Indicative assessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Module feedback

Written feedback, given in Week 5 for original assessment, and within two weeks of submission for re-assessed work

Indicative reading

Bindman, David, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum Publications, 1989).

Donald, Diana, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

Godfrey, Richard, with Hallett, Mark, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), esp. pp. 22-37, 90-185.

Thale, Mary: ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Barrell, John, The Spirit of Despotism (Oxford 2006).