
Contents
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The comic annual as a print form The comic annual as a print form
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Mirth Mirth
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Fun Fun
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The Comic Annual and The Comic Offering join battle The Comic Annual and The Comic Offering join battle
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Robert Seymour and the comic wood engraving Robert Seymour and the comic wood engraving
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Satire versus fun: The frontispieces to The Comic Offering Satire versus fun: The frontispieces to The Comic Offering
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Conclusion: Comic annuals and the history of graphic humour Conclusion: Comic annuals and the history of graphic humour
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Notes Notes
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4 ‘Mirth’ and ‘Fun’: The Comic Annual and the New Graphic Humour of the 1830s
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Published:June 2024
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Abstract
The central concern of this chapter is a consideration of the variety of ways in which comic annuals– a small, interconnected and highly visible group of publications from the 1830s– began self-consciously to debate, develop and enact the modes of graphic humour available within late Regency print culture. A further interest is the extent to which such re-conceptualisations of humour were gendered in order to accommodate women within the marketplace for graphic humour. This chapter further explores the redefinition of graphic humour as “fun” rather than the more literary “mirth” that characterized the Regency period. Like literary annuals, comic annuals were richly illustrated and were designed to appeal, in part, to a female readership; however, instead of incorporating steel-cut engravings, they employed wood-cut illustration to achieve humorous effects– a method that would soon dominate Victorian comic illustration. This chapter highlights the self-consciousness of the comic annual genre through an analysis of a mock-heroic poem, The Battle of the “Annuals” (1835), and through analysis of the frontispieces to The Comic Offering.
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