The visual and the verbal: the intermediality of English satire, c. 1695–1750

This chapter examines the extensive intermediality of English satire by demonstrating the intimate links between the visual and the verbal in works from the early to mid-eighteenth century. In part, the focus is on the inherent visuality of even textual satires as material objects, including not only their cryptographic title pages and suggestive mise-en-page, but also the graphic qualities of writing and typography itself. This chapter also discusses how words become images and how textual descriptions entail readerly visualisations through ‘weak ekphrasis’, i.e., the use of gradual descriptions that encourage readers to visualise, often to satiric effect, that which an author, speaker or narrator has left ambiguous. Finally, the chapter studies the illustrations that accompanied – but sometimes succeeded and even supplanted – verbal satires in a process of ‘re-semanticisation’, i.e., the way a satiric object, whether primarily textual, such as a poem, or primarily visual, such as a print, was subjected to dialectical cycles of readerly re-interpretation. Such works of satire are fundamentally intermedial (or even hypermedial); they straddle the boundaries between the verbal and the visual by both actively occluding and yet implicitly drawing attention to the material forms in which they circulate. In this regard, the intermingling of text and image is central to eighteenth-century satire, which elicited from readers simultaneous and successive forms of visual and verbal literacy, producing a cognitive economy essential to understanding the ambiguity that typifies works from this period.