Satire, instruction and useful knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain: the enlightenment mock arts

Bullard, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7193-0844 (2025) Satire, instruction and useful knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain: the enlightenment mock arts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781009460521 doi: 10.1017/9781009460477

Abstract/Summary

This book a long line of commentaries on ‘how-to’ knowledge and mechanical expertise in British poems, essays and novels of the eighteenth century. Its modes were not, however, directly instrumental, or straightforwardly didactic, as the modern historiography of industrial revolution expects. Invariably its framing was satirical, critical, and oblique. The ‘mock arts’ studied in this book dwelt half in the realm of encyclopaedic explication, and half in the tacit dimension of manual finesse. Eighteenth-century satirists submitted to a general paradox: that the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. Their explorations of mechanical expertise produced little in the way of straightforward description of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.

Additional Information	Open Access for this book was funded by the University of Reading. The book is available under a CC BY NC licence - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Item Type	Book
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/116464
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/9781009460477
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
Additional Information	Open Access for this book was funded by the University of Reading. The book is available under a CC BY NC licence - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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