The Anti-Jacobin and its Parodic Strategies: Parodying Jacobin Ideas and Authors

Abstract

This study highlights the parodic skills employed in the literary section of The Anti-Jacobin (1797-1798), a periodical edited by William Gifford, written mainly by G. Canning, J. H. Frere and G. Ellis and supported even by Prime Minister William Pitt. Parody is its main mechanism, being generated across an extraordinary range of genres beyond poetry and scholarly and popular prose, thereby demonstrating its malleability and creativity in the Romantic era and demonstrating its versatility and originality. Due to its peculiarity, it is necessary to provide a description of the work’s nature and structure, while examples are selected and analysed in order to clarify this original use of the parodic resource in the literature-politics binomial.