Satire, Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Paddy Bullard teaches English Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His publications as editor include The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), and A History of English Georgic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.

• 1. Introduction: enlightenment mock arts and industrial enlightenment; 2. Daedalus and Proteus: satire and useful knowledge in seventeenth-century England; 3. The Scriblerian mock arts: eighteenth-century satires of didacticism; 4. Anthropologies of the mechanical arts: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's travels; 5. Ingenuity, industry, experience: eighteenth-century georgic; 6. Manuals of mock arts: the art of ingeniously tormenting and Tristram Shandy; 7. The art of teaching to invent: Maria Edgeworth and the lunar society.

'Bullard has written what will become the how-to of how-to satire in the long eighteenth century. This is a thrilling and instructive read which invites us to think differently about the texts presented here through the lens of the mock arts.' Helen Williams, Associate Professor of English Literature, Northumbria University