Bloomsbury Academic Ridiculous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment

Ridiculous Critics is an anthology of eighteenth-century writings on the figure of the literary critic, and on the critic’s mixed and complex role. The collection assembles critical texts and satirical images chronologically to suggest a vision of the history of eighteenth-century literary criticism. Including comic, vicious, heartfelt and absurd passages from critics, poets, novelists and literary commentators celebrated and obscure, the writings range through poetry, fiction, drama, and periodical writing. The anthology also includes two original essays discussing and illustrating the irrepressible spirit of critical ridicule in the period, and commending its value and effect. The first offers an evaluation of the merciless and sometimes shockingly venomous satirical attacks on critical habits and personalities of the eighteenth century. The editors argue that such attacks are reflexive, in the sense that criticism becomes increasingly supple and able to observe and examine its own irresponsible ingenuities from within. The volume’s concluding essay supplies an analysis of modern modes of criticism and critical history, and suggests applications across time. We propose that humor’s vital force was once an important part of living criticism. The eighteenth-century mockery of critics casts light on a neglected common thread in the history of criticism and its recent manifestations; it prompts questions about the relative absence of comedy from the stories we presently tell about critics dead or alive. The passages invite laughter, both with the critics and at their expense, and suggest the place that ridicule might have had since the eighteenth century in the making of judgments, and in the pricking of critical pretension. For this reason, they indicate the role that laughter may still have in criticism today and provide an encouraging precedent for its future. Review [The authors] provide a fascinating hybrid collection/anthology on the role of ridicule in criticism produced during the long 18th century. They focus on ridicule of critics/criticism rather than by critics (though sometimes the boundary blurs). In both the critical commentary it offers and the primary texts by the period's 'ridiculous critics' it includes, the volume stands as a history of a body of criticism that has been largely ignored, and which has implications for today's critical practices. In part 1, the editors consider the balance of serious and unserious in English criticism and 'suggest that a corpus of comic and satirical writings with its own genealogy' reveals 'what criticism was, and should be.' In part 2, they provide examples of such writings (and some satirical prints), beginning with Buckingham's Rehearsal and proceeding to satirical jabs by Rochester, Swift, Wycherley, Pope, Parnell, Fielding, Smart, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Sterne, Gibbon, et al. In part 3, the editors suggest that bringing together the 'laughter of critics [and] their own laughable vices . . . offers a way of being serious about things . . . that serious expression renders trivial, obscure, or ineffective.' All who profess themselves literary critics should take a serious look at this book. Summing Up: Essential. All readers.-- "Choice" There are more books on Augustan satire and Augustan criticism than I can count, but no one has ever bothered to bring the two scholarly discourses together. Smallwood and Wild are the first to explore mockery as a serious critical mode, and their innovative approach brings unfamiliar text to light and lets us see familiar ones from new angles. Ridiculous Critics is essential reading for any student of eighteenth-century criticism or satire--which is to say any student of eighteenth-century literature.--Jack Lynch, Rutgers University About the Author Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham University and Honorary Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities at B