The Springs of Liberty: The Satiric Tradition and Freedom of Speech

This text takes up questions of literary history and theory even as it explores sources of power harnessed by modern political doctrines and the journalism that conveys them to the public. These forces of opinion are traced to a tradition deeper and older than either - satire. In that tradition - its power, diversity, and license - the author locates the spirit of free speech. Considering satire not as a genre but a potential available to different genres,
The Springs of Liberty
follows two satiric lines through English literature: a line critical of journalism that includes Addison, Austen, and Trollope and one less mannerly, running from Swift through to Dickens to Joyce and Orwell, that explodes the kind of stock formulas of which so much journalism is made. Also discussed is the exploitation of the power of satire in political doctrine. This volume follows
The Psychological Mystique,
also published by Northwestern University Press. It concentrates on a tradition that searches the mind and its delusions with a minimum of medical pretense and with scepticism toward jargon. Many of the authors featured in the former volume reappear here - Swift, for one, as an explorer of modern brains; Orwell as a modernist whose return to the springs of liberty took him at last to Menippean satire.