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Part of
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 385–403

Caricature and realism

| Aarhus University

The two dynamic centers of caricature in the nineteenth century were England and France. Here, censorship was flexible enough to create a space for public satire targeting both the new and old social classes and types in the emergent modern society. The satirists mock the elite holding the political and economic power, and do so with an attitude ranging from roaring laughter to a discreet smile. With a both verbal and visual dimension, caricatures became part of the satire in both visual prints and printed texts, not least in the new journals, newspapers and magazines that flourished in the nineteenth century based on new reproductive technologies and a growing readership, an urban readership in particular. Caricatures found their topics in all corners of society and approached indiscriminately high and low, crowds and individual, politics and daily habits, traditions and transitory phenomena in a mixture of laughter and afterthought. With readings in Nikolai Gogol’s Mertvye Dushi (1842), Charles Baudelaire’s essays on laughter and caricature (1855–1857) and visual caricatures by James Gillray, Grandville and an anonymous caricaturist, this case study will focus on caricatures of people and objects. The main problems to be discussed concern the contribution of caricatures to the reshaping of the understanding of human identity and of the material universe of the modern world.

Keywords: caricature, stereotyping, laughter, censorship, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, James Gillray, Charles Philipon, realism
Article outline
  • 1.Ambiguous stereotyping
  • 2.Being oneself and another
  • 3.Caricature as public engagement
  • 4.Is this caricature?
  • Notes
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.10lar
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