Access Type
Online access to this book is only available to eligible users.
Files
Download Full Text (3.3 MB)
Description
“Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us”—Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748).
In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed “every opprobrious term” to chastise women. In The Brink of All We Hate, Felicity Nussbaum documents and groups those opprobrious terms in order to identify the conventions of the satires, to demonstrate how those conventions create a myth, to provide critical readings of poetic texts in the antifeminist tradition, and to draw some conclusions about the basic nature of satire. Nussbaum finds that the English tradition of antifeminist satire draws on a background that includes Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal, as well as the more modern French tradition of La Bruyere and Boileau and the late seventeenth-century English pamphlets by Gould, Fige, and Ames. The tradition was employed by the major figures of the golden age of satire—Samuel Butler, Dryden, Swift, Addison, and Pope.
Examining the elements of the tradition of antifeminist satire and exploring its uses, from the most routine to the most artful, by the various poets, Nussbaum reveals a clearer context in which many poems of the Restoration and eighteenth century will be read anew.
Felicity Nussbaum is professor of English at Syracuse University and has edited Three Seventeenth-Century Satires, The Plays of David Mallet, and An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Critical Studies of Women and Literature, 1660-1800.
"Will appeal to Restoration and eighteenth-century scholars and to women's studies faculty. . . . It will be the book on the subject for some time to come."—Shirley Strum Kenny
Publication Date
1984
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813154091
eISBN
9780813164076
Keywords
Women in literature, English satire, Antifeminism, Antifeminist satire, Early modern English literature
Disciplines
Literature in English, British Isles
Recommended Citation
Nussbaum, Felicity A., "The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750" (1984). Literature in English, British Isles. 48.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/48
Consortium members may access while on their campus.
