David Francis Taylor

Biographic Data

ID1509282
NAMEDavid Francis Taylor
GIVEN NAMESDavid Francis
FAMILY NAMETaylor
SIGNATURETAYLOR D F
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Oxford
ORCID0000-0002-5420-8793
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS15
TOTAL CITATIONS6
AUTHOR COUNT14
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2009
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • Cato in Tennessee: Perspectives on a Theatrical Experiment

    Open AccessMisty G Anderson, Shinnerrie Jackson et al.ARTICLETDR/The Drama Review2025

    Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023

  • What Cato Did: Suicide, Sentimentalism, and the Drama of Emulation

    David Francis TaylorARTICLEEighteenth-Century Life2022

    Much recent criticism of Joseph Addison's Cato (1713) regards the tragedy as determinedly resistant to its eponymous protagonist's stoic heroism. Cato, it is argued, critiques Cato. But this wasn't how Addison's immediate contemporaries experienced the play. For many commentators, Addison's Cato was a model not only to be applauded but also imitated. In this essay, I take seriously this disconnection between current interpretation and immediate r…

  • The Practice of Parody

    David Francis TaylorCHAPTEROxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Centu…2019

    This chapter takes the trials of William Hone in 1817 as a useful late-period vantage point from which to look back across a century and more of parodic practice and play, and also as a prism through which to address and properly historicize some of the key theoretical questions that pertain to eighteenth-century parody. Its first section considers how the period understood the imperatives of parody and so, perforce, parody’s relationship to sati…

  • The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorBOOKThe Politics of Parody2018

    This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understan…

  • The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

    David Francis TaylorBOOKPolitics of Parody2018

  • The Tempest; or, The Disenchanted Island

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorCHAPTERThe Politics of Parody2018

    This chapter focuses on William Shakespeare's The Tempest as political theater, a play that is not a particular favorite with eighteenth-century graphic satirists. In their 1667 adaptation The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island , John Dryden and William Davenant took up Shakespeare's drama as a performative laboratory for their post-interregnum exploration of patriarchal power, casting Prospero as a father-king and Caliban and company as parodic, s…

  • Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

    David Francis TaylorBOOKPolitics of Parody2018

  • Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

    David Francis TaylorBOOKPolitics of Parody2018

  • Looking, Literacy, and the Printshop Window

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorCHAPTERThe Politics of Parody2018

    This chapter examines the satirical print. The single-sheet satirical print was fundamentally a social form; it was designed to be seen, enjoyed, and lingered over by the group far more than the solitary reader. As the sites of display and modes of engagement that structured the culture of caricature make abundantly clear, prints not only invited but were in many ways predicated on practices of communal reading and consumption. Most obviously, th…

  • Paradise Lost, from the Sublime to the Ridiculous

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorCHAPTERThe Politics of Parody2018

    This chapter assesses John Milton's Paradise Lost as a source for graphic satire. The many graphic satirical parodies of Paradise Lost disclose the workings of two different political readings of the poem, readings that respectively function to attenuate and foster rather different conceptions of the Miltonic sublime. The first, and more familiar, regards Milton's epic as an anti-Whig allegory that warns readers of the dangers of opposing the con…

  • Graphic satire and the Enlightenment eye

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorARTICLECritical Quarterly2017

    Eighteenth-century satire’s deep immersion in and articulation of the prevailing visual epistemology of the Enlightenment has often been noted. But in the case of graphic satire the question of satire’s proximity to the optical metaphors, practices, and technologies of the period is especially complex. Graphic satire is, by definition, visual; its language is that of the image, or, more accurately, of an image-text imbrication. When we look at sa…

  • The practice of caricature in 18th‐century Britain

    Open AccessDavid Francis TaylorARTICLELiterature Compass2017Cited by: 1References: 5

    This essay offers a survey of critical studies of caricature—as in the art of physiognomic exaggeration and distortion—in 18th‐century Britain. It reviews scholarship that has grappled with such questions as: what is caricature and how do we recognize it? Why caricature? How does caricature make itself felt within the hierarchies of 18th‐century British culture? When and why does it emerge in Britain as a dominant mode of visual satire? What, in …

  • The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832

    Julia Swindells, David Francis TaylorBOOKThe Oxford Handbook of the…2014Cited by: 3

    This Handbook provides an essential guide to theatre in Britain between the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 and the Reform Act of 1832—a period of drama long neglected but now receiving significant scholarly attention. Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty chapters both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field, asking question…

  • Theatres of OppositionEmpire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan

    David Francis Taylor, David FrancisBOOKTheatres of Opposition2012Cited by: 2

    Richard Brinsley Sheridan is best known as the author of two of the English stage’s most popular comedies, The Rivals and The School for Scandal. In his own lifetime, however, Sheridan was as renowned a politician as he was a playwright, and during a parliamentary career that spanned thirty‐two years—the large majority of which he spent in opposition—he was an advocate of reform, a supporter of the French Revolution and of Irish independence, and…

  • The Psalm Commentary of Daniel of Salah and the Formation of Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Identity

    David Francis Taylor, David TaylorARTICLEChurch History and Religious…2009

    By the 540s the anti-Chalcedonian Syrian Miaphysites had experienced frequent periods of persecution and were in the process of developing into an independent church, with distinct structures and doctrine. Unable to found schools for their clergy, they needed alternative methods to provide ideological formation. This paper argues that the Miaphysite leaders identified the exegesis of the Psalms, the quintessence of the scriptures and the heart of…