[Review] Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770

The business of defining satire, let alone assessing its uses and motivations, is fraught with difficulty. Much of the early part of Ashley Marshall’s study is devoted to establishing that previous scholarly accounts of satire’s history in the long eighteenth century have been misguided, or at least incomplete: they extrapolate broad conclusions from a small number of not-very-representative canonical texts; they tend to impose an inappropriate coherence upon a genre diverse in its tones, aims, and techniques.