This essay demonstrates the applicability of Brukean concepts to political cartoons. More specifically, it examines a sample of eighty‐three James Watt cartoons and explains: (a) the formal strategy of perspective by incongruity employed in political cartoons; (b) the attitude of rejection or burlesque typically exemplified by the art form; and (c) the fusion of form and attitude in the tropes of metaphor, irony, synecdoche, and metonymy, which serve as organizing principles to guide audience readings of cartoons.
Making light of James Watt: A Burkean approach to the form and attitude of political cartoons
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