The Others by Paul Shepard

Author:Paul Shepard [Shepard, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610912433
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

ALTHOUGH IT LOOKED back to the old Christian idea of a degraded human as part animal, a new meaning of the amalgamated form became prevalent in eighteenth-century newspapers and books—as a lampoon of prominent individuals. In secular forms such hybrids continue to occupy the human imagination and express disjunct ideas. For example, the art of caricature stitched an identifiable human face to an animal body. It depended on a conventionalized public recognition of the appearance of politicians and others and a stereotype of each species. Caricature attacks and ridicules the target by identifying it in one dimension and exaggerating some supposed quality or characteristic: the arrogance of the lion, the balkiness of the mule, the deceits of the fox. Caricaturing is a strange descendent of our ancient human proclivity for identifying by dissecting and reconstructing. Indeed, the process has become an instrument for the butchering of reputation.

The practice of individual assassination by caricature was extended in the nineteenth century to social groups by such artists as Grandville, whose parodies of class, bureaucracy, professions, races, political groups, and social systems was accomplished by attaching human bodies to animal heads. Grandville’s little burlesques are widely reproduced as drolleries in modern literary journals, much the way marginal illustrations enlivened the pages of medieval manuscripts or grotesque sculptures appeared in eighteenth-century Italian gardens.

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