Making light of James Watt: A Burkean approach to the form and attitude of political cartoons

Abstract

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.