Satire's Name Games: What Reader Notations Reveal

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座摘要/ Abstract 

Hundreds of surviving copies of printed satire in rare book libraries contain manuscript notations. But scholars have rarely consulted these copy-specific notations for evidence of how eighteenth-century readers experienced satire. This talk will use such evidence to question one traditional assumption in satire studies: that understanding topical satire depends on identifying the individuals attacked. Analyzing notations across copies of Samuel Garth’s 1699 The Dispensary and Lady Anne Hamilton’s 1807 Epics of the Ton, I will argue that most early readers had at best a partial comprehension of the specific individuals targeted in these poems and that satirists exploited gaps in reader knowledge and reader awareness of these gaps to advance their goals.

 主讲人简介/ CV 

Michael Edson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming (USA). His research areas are eighteenth-century poetry and satire, histories of reading, and the theory and evolution of editorial annotation. He serves as Associate Editor of Duke University’s Eighteenth-Century Life and has published two edited volumes, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman (Delaware University Press, 2015), as well as many journal articles and book chapters. His in-progress monograph is entitled “Imperfect Reading: Knowledge and Ignorance in Satire.”

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