Brian Maidment, de Liverpool John Moores University, présentera sa communication “The Death of Caricature? – The Comic Image 1820-1840” le jeudi 22 mars 2018 de 17h30 à 19h30. Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, 75006, salle D421.

Résumé :

“Accounts of the history of the comic image in the 1820s and 1830s have largely been both elegiac and dismissive, mourning the decline of the caricature tradition represented by Gillray, Rowlandson and their contemporaries while simultaneously scorning the widespread production of what David Kunzle memorably called ‘graphic bric-a-brac’ in its place. Yet while there is something of a shift from witty and allusive political commentary to the celebration of the diversionary, the miscellaneous and the trivial, it is hard not to be impressed by the range, vigour and sheer exuberance with which satirical and humorous images invaded the market place for print in the period between 1820 and 1837. Using new or re-invigorated reprographic methods like wood engraving and lithography, the late Regency comic image was used to structure a wide range of generically innovative print genres and forms which included – in addition to various reformulations of entirely pictorial publication – songbooks, play texts, almanacs, annuals and periodicals. This mass of graphic production, much of it newly visible to scholars through digitisation, offers an important response to Regency urban culture which has up to now been undervalued by historians. Within this riot of print, the tradition of graphic political satire, while often incorporated into hybridised and generically complex print forms, was able to survive on at least into the early Victorian period. This paper seeks to offer a brief overview of the role of caricature and the comic within late Regency print culture.”