Toasting, Oratory and Parody in Britain during the French Revolution
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: : In keeping with recent historiography on the interplay of orality and literature in Romantic Britain, this article starts from the emergence of toasting in the early phase of the French Revolution as a new form of radical discourse, in the context of a budding public-dinner sociability. The main focus bears on conservative parodies of such radical toasting, in papers such as the Times and especially the Anti-Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin Review. Parody enabled conservatives to mimic republican and regicidal tropes in ways that were much more outrageous than the alleged radical originals, thus testing the limits of public speech in 1790s Pittite Britain. The article ends with a close reading of a particularly ornate parody, based on an ode by Horace, of the Duke of Norfolk’s notorious toast to “the Majesty of the People,” which symbolized, in the eyes of the selfstyled anti-Jacobins, the treachery and inconsequence of the Foxite Whigs in the 1790s.
Source: Litteraria Pragensia
Author: Rémy Duthille
Institution: Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4407223346