This chapter touches on three moments in Modern Hebrew realist literature. The earliest is the late nineteenth century, in which Modern Hebrew was first widely read. Focusing on S. Y. Abramovich’s “In the Secret Place of Thunder,” I argue that the novella’s formal clash between realist and religious social worlds constitutes an attempt to think through the uneven capitalist development of Eastern European Jewish towns in the period. I then turn to Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel, He Walked through the Fields, a novel paradigmatic in the development of narrative interiority in Hebrew realism. I argue that interiority is invented in order to retain the historical perception of a reality that has gone into crisis. The last text is Avivit Mishmari’s 2013 satirical novel The Old Man Lost His Mind. I argue that the novel should be read against its postmodern predecessors, which registered the terminal crisis of older national-hegemonic historicity. In Mishmari’s novel new developments in Israeli capitalist social form – the advent of anti-liberal capitalism alongside older neoliberal sensibilities – are allegorically juxtaposed to one another, in an effort to restart the Israeli historical imagination.

Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle produced a series of satires in a distinctive mock-didactic mode, the mock art. Originally Swift used it to attack a ‘mechanical’ dissenting clergy. Later he adapted it to larger issues concerning the fragmentation and uncontrolled accumulation of knowledge in the modern age. John Gay broadened the theme by exploring its cognitive dimensions. It was in political polemic, however, that mock-technical satire achieved its widest circulation, as a critical trope against state-craftsmen and artificial politicians. Finally, in Peri Bathous Pope and John Arbuthnot imagined a wholly artificial poetic art. Their critical thought-experiment ends this line of development in the mock-art idea. With each successive iteration, its basis in the social denigration of skilled workers receded, and the satire became more ambivalent. Pope, at first the most abusive of the denigrators, at last produced the most balanced and experimental of all the Scriblerian mock arts.

This chapter is an introduction to the Enlightenment mock arts, set out in three historical hypotheses. First, early-modern writers became increasingly interested in the cognitive (rather than simply material) value in the work of skilled technicians. The mock-arts were models for the intuitions involved in skilled manufacture, related to certain ineffable components of literary production. Second, the literary framing for those investigations was invariably satirical (or oblique and critical in other ways). As specialists in literary wit, authors of mock arts put themselves forward as experts in curiosity, invention and communication. Third, writers became more subtle in their assumptions about the print trade and the suitability of books as tools that might contribute to the communication of personal knowledge. Since convention defined that sort of knowledge by the impossibility of pinning it down in books, this opened another field for irony and indirection.

In the seventeenth century British natural philosophers explored the cognitive value of mechanical trades. From the beginning, these explorations of down-to-earth manual processes were expressed in oblique and ironic texts. In utopian fictions by Thomas More, Francis Bacon and Gabriel Plattes, mechanical trades were presented as at once near-at-hand and alien to the world of books and codified knowledge. Bacon’s mid-century followers tried to negotiate these difficulties in plans to compile a comprehensive ‘History of Trades’. In the period’s most widely circulated didactic text, Izaac Walton’s Compleat Angler, the tacit and haptic dimension of a humble pass-time was explored through genial satire and eccentric textual design. Later, one highly literate artisan, the printer and instrument maker Joseph Moxon, gave thought to the difference between the artisanal expertise he employed as a manual technician and the theoretical knowledge he dealt with as a writer and fellow of the Royal Society.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

In Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia several concerns of the eighteenth-century mock artists – their didactic technologies, their investigations in the physically extended and tacit dimensions of human cognition (‘intuitive analogy’, in Darwin’s terms) – received the attention of scientific inquiry. Darwin’s friends Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth fed his ideas back into educational discourse in Practical Education and then forward again into Maria’s novel Belinda. She had written one of the last eighteenth-century mock arts, her ‘Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification’. Belinda represents a final convergence of Industrial Enlightenment didactic experiment with an older tradition of mock-didactic social satire. Readers have complained that Edgeworth’s writing is hampered by its didactic impulses and by their uncertain instructive ends. This concluding chapter argues that the intentions of her fiction are coherent when read as part of the Enlightenment mock-technical tradition.

Critics have tended to downplay the connections between Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jane Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, but these two experimental, high-concept satires, with their shared Swiftian heritage, in fact have much in common. Both present – with different levels of irony – as systems of instruction, written to help people negotiate straightened social settings. The art of engineering small conversational triumphs is a common concern. The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting is a pure mock art, cut back to a sequence of instructive maxims. The pseudo-didactic component in Tristram Shandy is, by contrast, only one element in a patchwork of textual features. Both are burlesques of the conventions of early modern manuals and handbooks. They represent a retreat for the Enlightenment mock arts back into the realm of satirical fiction and print-format experimentation. They also mark a new level of subtlety in their treatment of the mock arts’ cognitive themes.

This chapter argues that Shelley’s laughter – as outburst and affect, and as comedy and satire – is both a way for him to put his aspirations for poetry to the test, and of giving humorous expression to them. For Shelley, laughter is attuned to the pains his poetry confronts and seeks to redress, and seems at once an obstacle to the radical energies of the imagination and a vehicle for his own ecstatic, prophetic strains. Shelley is a writer of restive, divided instincts, and his impulse for the laughable is as complex and contradictory as his feelings towards poetry. His laughter is by turns scornful and sympathetic, while at other times it bursts from anarchic desires and discloses the elusive and seemingly unknowable. The laughable, then, often appears like what he conceives poetry to be, while his native ambivalence towards laughter is borne of his doubts about where art comes from, and its influence.

This chapter discusses the relationship between Shelley and one of his closest friends: Thomas Love Peacock. It sketches the origins and development of that friendship and suggests some reasons for its significance. Particular attention is paid to the very different casts of mind of the two men, something that is especially evident in Peacock’s criticism of what he regarded as Shelley’s culpable neglect of reality, in both his life and his art. Such criticism has its most enduring literary manifestation in Peacock’s caricature of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey – a novel by which Shelley, to his credit, was delighted. The chapter concludes with an account of Peacock’s peculiarly reticent Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he sought to defend the biographical dignity of the poet against a malicious and frequently error-prone ‘tribunal of public opinion’.

This chapter covers the two decades from the first minuted meeting of the Commissioners of Longitude in 1737. During this time, small groups of Commissioners were called together sporadically for ad hoc meetings, principally to agree funding for specific projectors, notably clockmaker John Harrison and longitude veteran William Whiston. Over this initial period, relations with Harrison were cordial and supportive. Despite these promising developments, it was a period in which public opinion gradually reverted to mockery of those seeking the seemingly impossible longitude dream. The chapter seeks to emphasise in addition the value of looking at some of the schemes that more recent authors have dismissed as invalid. This has occurred not only when proposals seem unlikely to modern eyes but also when their authors were partly or wholly motivated by factors such as religion or financial need, and overlooks the reception of those proposals. The books published by Jane Squire are a particular focus, since they contain some of the best records of the Commissioners’ activities and thoughts during the earlier decades.

This chapter offers a survey of the ways in which the British Board of Longitude handled the range of schemes and projects that were presented by mathematicians and mariners, inventors and entrepreneurs during its final decades to 1828. Labels of impracticality, eccentricity and derangement have long been assigned to many of these proposals, notably in the classification scheme imposed by Astronomer Royal George Airy in his reorganisation of the Board’s archives from the 1840s. This chapter favours close reading of the ways in which schemes were assessed and managed at the time. In the bulky correspondence received, schemes for new devices, calculation methods or navigation techniques were mixed with projects for squaring the circle or endless mechanical power. The Board distinguished between those projects reckoned impossible or unsound, and those it judged irrelevant or beyond its scope. It is shown how much discretionary power the Board exercised, and how its accumulated papers preserve a wide range of protagonists’ technical and scientific interests.

This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

While most of Johnson’s paid professional writing was in prose, he wrote accomplished poetry from the age of 15 until the last month of his life, and often poured into it his most personal feelings – especially those poems and verse prayers which he wrote in Latin. Most celebrated are Johnson’s two imitations of satires by Juvenal. In London, the first of these, Johnson adopted the light personification (‘unrewarded science toils in vain’) which became his trademark. The second, The Vanity of Human Wishes, is the quintessential Johnsonian work, a meditation on false hope whose conclusion can be read as either tragic or optimistic. The same theme runs through Johnson’s fictional writing – the shorter tales as well as his longest, Rasselas. This gently comic work, much of it merely episodic, follows the Abyssinian Prince, Rasselas, as he seeks the answer to life – and ends on another ambiguous conclusion.

Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.

The chronology of the Baroque age in Russian culture is contested, but by the broadest definition it can be located in the second half of the seventeenth century and approximately the first third of the eighteenth century. The emergence of the Baroque tends to coincide with the emergence of the court as a focus and patron. General features include a greater prominence of individuality (even originality), a greater emphasis on entertainment as one function and purpose of literary production, and a highlighting of performative verbal and formal devices. This chapter explores two types of literary production that particularly exemplify aspects of the Baroque mode: parody and satire, and syllabic verse. As a case-study in the latter, the chapter introduces a cycle of poems by the most prominent and prolific Baroque versifier, and arguably Moscow’s first professional writer of literature, Simeon Polotskii.