This book explores the verse and prose satires written by British authors between the French Revolution and the Great Reform Bill, roughly the era that later became known as the Romantic period. The bibliography of verse satires that is appended to the present study attests to how vast is this largely unexplored literary territory. By contextualizing both well-known and obscure works, this book reveals unexpected stylistic and ideological crosscurrents in this literature and charts the connections among satirical writing, political ideology, practical politics, and the realities of the literary marketplace.

Instead of a single, overarching argument, this book makes several interrelated claims. Because of acute contemporary political conflicts, the traditional division widened between Juvenalian (harsh, tragic) and Horatian (mild, comic) satiric poetry, and each of these two styles gathered new political connotations that forced reformist writers into a mode that was more intricately ironic than either – the mode I have chosen to term Radical satire. In the process of examining how literary conventions and traditions are transmitted and given new meanings, my analysis illuminates four subjects in particular: (i) the gendering of discursive forms and media; (2) the shifting and highly charged boundaries between the public and private realms; (3) the capacity of puns to detract from a satire's truth-claims by underscoring the materiality and arbitrariness of linguistic signifiers; and, most importantly, (4) the strategies social and political commentary employed to dramatize its need to deflect the ever-present threat of prosecution for sedition or blasphemy.