Andrew Benjamin Bricker

This dissertation offers a legal account of the growth and putative death of what has often been called ‘Augustan satire.’ In doing so, it demonstrates the extent to which both statutory laws and the common law developed to target later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century satiric practices and techniques. At the same time, writers and their booksellers responded to these legal advances, evading new laws, precedents and procedures, while simultaneously devising new rhetorical and bibliographic strategies to stymie potential actions and prosecutions.