Monographs by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long... more Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions. Writers increasingly capitalized on forms of verbal ambiguity, including irony, allegory, circumlocution, and indirection, while shifty printers and booksellers turned to a host of publication ruses that complicated the mechanics of both detection and prosecution. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers' tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire's most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature-acoustic and visual forms that relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or the courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.
Articles by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Literary Review of Canada, 2021
Literary Review of Canada , 2020
Literary Review of Canada, 2020
Literary Review of Canada, 2019
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2018
It is a commonplace of literary history that satire vanishes in the middle of the eighteenth cent... more It is a commonplace of literary history that satire vanishes in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is clear, however, that written and especially visual satire witness massive growth in the final decades of the century and throughout the Romantic era. My goal is to explain this simultaneous contraction and expansion of the satiric marketplace. Rather than dying, I argue, satire begins to migrate to visual media, and especially caricature, after mid-century. The reason for this migration is the shifting procedural norms of libel law itself. Over the first half of the century, the courts developed procedures for delimiting verbal ambiguity in trials for libel that made the publication of written satire perilous. These same procedures were largely useless, however, in the prosecution of visual materials, which made at best sparing use of words—they were, as I put it, “deverbalized”—and therefore not subject to the same rulings and interpretive procedures.
For the full article, please go to https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688757/summary or email the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2017
Literary scholars often take at face value Henry Fielding’s most overt rejections of Bernard Mand... more Literary scholars often take at face value Henry Fielding’s most overt rejections of Bernard Mandeville, a writer he associated with egoism and who argued that self-interest is at the core of all virtuous action. Yet Fielding’s rejections are not decisive, tending instead towards ad hominem attacks, insubstantial objections, and unexpected accommodations of egoist arguments. Throughout his corpus, Fielding exhibits a creeping Mandevilleanism: egoist thought frequently gets uncredited airing in his works. Fielding’s debt to egoism is clearest in his attempts to define “good nature,” his highest term of approbation, which appears throughout his writings. Like Mandeville, Fielding understood that self-interest motivates virtuous action. The two writers diverged on whether the social goods of self-motivated action should be recognized, ultimately, as virtuous deeds. For Mandeville, self-interest cancels out the virtue of the act; for Fielding, a mislaid emphasis on motivation fails to account for the disposition of the actor, the consequent good produced, and the socially cohesive nature of mutual empathy.
For the full article, please visit https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671523 or contact the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Jan 2016
Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however,... more Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 2016
The overarching goal of this article is to present a methodology for attributing publications wit... more The overarching goal of this article is to present a methodology for attributing publications with false and misleading imprints to their unnamed printers. The answer to this problem—how to link publications featuring inaccurate imprints back to those who actually printed them—lies in the use of ornament catalogues. In short, knowing a printer’s ornament stock over a period of time would allow us to attribute works featuring false and misleading imprints from the same period to his or her printing house. Doing so would also allow us to pinpoint sometimes provisionally but often definitively one actor or unit in the life cycle of a publication—in this instance, the printing house from which it originated. In this article I focus specifically on the range of plausible-sounding but entirely made-up printers’ and booksellers’ names regularly found on false imprints throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, I hone in on the wholly fictional “A. Moore,” Using extant ornament catalogues, I have managed to attribute dozens of these A. Moore-imprinted publications to their respective printers. In addition, I present a theory of ornament usage that emerged as I assembled my corpus of A. Moore-imprinted works. The most intriguing case remains the recurring use of a headpiece and factotum combination in A. Moore-imprinted publications from the 1720s and 1730s that were in fact printed by the printer-bookseller Thomas Read. The regularity with which these two ornaments were used in tandem in A. Moore-imprinted publications, however, also suggests something much more interesting. In short, it seems Read (and perhaps others individually) reserved a small collection of ornaments for legally perilous publications. Read did so, theoretically, because he realized that ornaments might be a way for the legal authorities to do the very thing that I propose here as an investigative bibliographical methodology: to trace illicitly published works with false and misleading imprints back to the printers who actually produced them. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110.2 (June 2016): 181-214.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 2016
Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals’ social-cogniti... more Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals’ social-cognitive abilities. Findings from neuroscience show that reading and social cognition both recruit the default network, a network which is known to support our capacity to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces, and mental states. The current research tests the hypothesis that fiction reading enhances social cognition because it serves to exercise the default subnetwork involved in theory of mind. While undergoing functional neuroimaging, participants read literary passages that differed along two dimensions: (i) vivid vs. abstract, and (ii) social vs. nonsocial. Analyses revealed distinct subnetworks of the default network respond to the two dimensions of interest: the medial temporal lobe subnetwork responded preferentially to vivid passages, with or without social content; the dorsomedial prefrontal (dmPFC) subnetwork responded preferentially to passages with social and abstract content. Analyses also demonstrated that participants who read fiction most often also showed the strongest social cognition performance. Finally, mediation analysis showed that activity in the dmPFC subnetwork in response to the social content mediated this relation, suggesting that the simulation of social content in fiction plays a role in fiction’s ability to enhance readers’ social cognition.
For free full-text access to this article, click here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733342/pdf/nsv114.pdf
ELH: English Literary History, Sep 4, 2014
Literary historians have accounted for gutted names (like J---- S---- for John Smith) in eighteen... more Literary historians have accounted for gutted names (like J---- S---- for John Smith) in eighteenth-century satire in legal terms, arguing that such typographical ruses prevented actions and prosecutions for libel. But the legal record shows that gutted names served no legal function. This article argues, instead, that such naming practices served a host of commercial and aesthetic functions: they advertised the salacious nature of a satire and invited readers to take part in the construction of a scandal. Above all, gutted names served a dubious ethical end, one that purported to protect satiric victims, but did so in a largely superficial way.
Chapters by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Jaarboek De Achttiende Eeuw 52. Special Issue: Schurken, Schelmen en Schandalen. Ed. Elwin Hofman , 2020
A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment. Ed. Elizabeth Kraft. A Cultural History of Comedy, 6 vol. , 2021
Changing Satire: Transformations and Continuities in Europe, 1600 – 1830. Ed. Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård., 2022
Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair. Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University , 2020
Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities. Ed. Simon Stern, Bernadette Meyler and Maksymilian Del Mar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 2020
The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820, 2019
An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April Lon... more An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820, 2019
An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April Lon... more An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April Lon... more An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820, 2019
An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April Lon... more An entry in _The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820_, edited by April London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
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Monographs by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Articles by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
For the full article, please go to https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688757/summary or email the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
For the full article, please visit https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671523 or contact the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
For free full-text access to this article, click here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733342/pdf/nsv114.pdf
Chapters by Andrew Benjamin Bricker
For the full article, please go to https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688757/summary or email the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
For the full article, please visit https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671523 or contact the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be
For free full-text access to this article, click here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733342/pdf/nsv114.pdf
Published in The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom. Ed. Diana Fuss and William Gleason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 105-8. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10620.html
95.2 (Spring 2016): 293-298.
Press, 2014). Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 38.3 (Summer 2015): 224-26.