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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 263+xii. $59.95.
It has not been very many years since "satire" and "romanticism" were held to be antithetical terms. Satire, with its trademark emphasis on the exposure of human folly and its assertion of normative moral values, belonged more to a neo-classical than to a romantic sensibility. After 1789, however, what counted was the expression of the self rather than the dictates of Reason, the erotic appeal of a wild sublimity rather than the restrained taste for well-groomed artifice, the celebration rather than the castigation of quotidian humanity, a discourse of political commitment or personal confession rather than the reclusive poet's careful imitation of classical models, and so forth. Of course, several recent studies have shown that such dichotomies have been misleading--they have been, in fact, the products of a romantic ideology that is still working its way through both popular and academic cultures and that has blinkered our view of the kinds of writing that were actually being written and read during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gary Dyer's British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832 goes a long way toward correcting this historically dominant misperception...
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