Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper utilises an interdisciplinary approach to the satire boom of the early 1960s. It considers the Chatterley trial, the satire boom in journalism, and the development of visual satire by Timothy Birdsall in which he demonstrated a shared culture of modalities creating a cross-referenced paradigm of genres and platforms. Situated within themes such as declining deference and the popularisation of the press, the paper proposes that today’s concept of culture wars is far from new; indeed there are direct parallels between the beginning of the 1960s and the first years of the 2020s. Using excepts from Larkin’s poetry, newspaper news cartoons, and the satiric magazine Private Eye, the paper connects the two time periods to argue that the multidisciplinary nature of the humanities is intrinsically linked to other media including politics, journalism, and visual satire and makes a temporal connection between the period of Cuba and that of Covid.