Introduction

Lear’s limericks are meant for adults as well as children. Their illustrations and verse are equal in importance, often combining in bi-modal metaphors. The difference in a limerick between visual and literary art, along with allusions and puns in such a brief space, gives the limericks discontinuous inner form. Its aspects are juxtaposed, which makes Lear the first literary modernist. Moreover, the comic absurdity of his one-dimensional human figures gives him affinity with Samuel Beckett. The limericks are also modernist in their drawings being flat and linearly minimal, and the limericks creatively employing deconstruction. They are modern, too, in being autonymous of their author. Yet they reveal the inner Lear—a secondary aspect of their meaning, which a concluding abbreviated account of his life illuminates.