HST3183   Humour and Laughter in Eighteenth-Century Britain   (20 credits)

Description

Laughter is fundamental to human experience. Yet, the things we see fit to laugh at and how that laughter is thought about, tolerated, suppressed or celebrated, have all varied with time, place and culture with compelling possibilities for historians. Eighteenth-century Britain was a golden age of humour, brimming with bawdy jestbooks and a surfeit of satirical texts and images. It even witnessed the invention of caricature as we know it. The module explores this comic material-and ideas about it-to investigate fundamental shifts in manners, morality and political participation in the period, and the historiographical debates surrounding them.

Reading List