Read complete books and articles on: Satire in Literature

Satire - term applied to any work of literature or art whose objective is ridicule. It is more easily recognized than defined. From ancient times satirists have shared a common aim: to expose foolishness in all its guises—vanity, hypocrisy, pedantry, idolatry, bigotry, sentimentality—and to effect reform through such exposure. The many diverse forms their statements have taken

Classical Satirists

Outstanding among the classical satirists was the Greek dramatist Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds (423 b.c.) satirizes Socrates as the embodiment of atheism and sophistry, while The Wasps (422) satirizes the Athenian court system. The satiric styles of two Roman poets, Horace and Juvenal, became models for writers of later ages. The satire of Horace is mild, gently amused, yet sophisticated, whereas that of Juvenal is vitriolic and replete with moral indignation; Shakespeare later wrote Horatian satire and Jonathan Swift wrote Juvenalian satire.

The Golden Age of Satire

From the beast fables, fabliaux, and Chaucerian caricatures to the extended treatments of John Skelton, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Erasmus, and Cervantes, the satirical tradition flourished throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, culminating in the golden age of satire in the late 17th and early 18th cent. The familiar names of Swift, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Richard Steele, Henry Fielding, and William Hogarth, in England, and of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, La Fontaine, Molière, and Voltaire, in France, suggest not only the nature of the controversies that provided a target for the satirist's darts in both nations, but also the rediscovery and consequent adaptation of the classical models to individual talents. Pope, for example, wrote The Rape of the Lock (1714), a mock epic about the crisis that occurs when a lock of Lady Belinda's hair is snipped off by a suitor as she sips her coffee. The poem is based upon an actual happening, and Pope's Horatian tone gently castigates the frivolous life of London society. Swift, on the other hand, echoes Juvenal's "savage indignation." In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift exposes humanity in all its baseness and cruelty. Throughout his encounters with the inhabitants of imaginary lands, starting with the Lilliputians and ending with the Houyhnhnms—the latter are horses endowed with noble attributes, while their servants are bestial, filthy humanoids called Yahoos—Gulliver's (and Swift's) misanthropy grows, culminating in his refusal, once he is reunited with his family, to eat with creatures so closely resembling Yahoos.

The Nineteenth Century

In the 19th cent., satire gave way to a more gentle form of criticism. Manners and morals were still ridiculed but usually in the framework of a longer work, such as a novel. However, satire can be found in the poems of Lord Byron, in the librettos of William S. Gilbert, in the plays of Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw, and in the fiction of W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Samuel Butler, and many others. American satirists of the period include Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mark Twain.

The Twentieth Century

Although 20th-century satire continues to register Horatian or Juvenalian reactions to the enormities of an age dominated by fear of the atom bomb and plagued by pollution, racism, drugs, planned obsolescence, and the abuse of power, critics have discerned some shifts in its source. In some instances the satirist is the audience rather than the artist. Hence the enthusiasm in the 1960s for "camp"—defined by Susan Sontag as meaning works of art that can be enjoyed but not taken seriously, even though they may have been created seriously—indeed, works that are enjoyed for the very qualities that make them second-rate. Sontag's examples of "camp" include Tiffany lamps, the ballet Swan Lake, and the movie Casablanca. Occasionally the audience is the victim of the satire. The so-called put-on, whether a play (Samuel Beckett's Breath, in which breathing is heard on a blacked-out stage), a joke (Lenny Bruce's nightclub routines), or an artifact (John Chamberlain's smashed-up cars), seeks to confuse its audience by presenting the fraudulent as a true work of art, thus rendering the whole concept of "art" questionable. More conventional contemporary satirists of note are Sinclair Lewis, James Thurber, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden, Philip Roth, and Joseph Heller.

Bibliography

See G. Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (1962); L. Feinberg, The Satirist (1963); A. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (1965); critical anthology ed. by J. Russell and A. Brown (1967); J. R. Clark, ed., Satire—That Blasted Art (1973); M. Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance (1979); H. D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (1988).

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12 of the Best Books and Articles on: Satire in Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

English Satire and Satirists » Read Now
by Hugh Walker. 325 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...is present in Greek literature. There is satire in Homer, and there have...you," is satirical. In short, satire is almost as old as literature; and each people in...French...
2.

The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence » Read Now
by Leonard Feinberg. 376 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...lectures on satire which were...Laughter." In 1957-1958...American Literature at the University...vice exists in literature." A satirists...that he felt satire can be...
3.

Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill » Read Now
by Christopher Yu. 219 pgs.

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Nothing to Admire argues for the persistence of a central tradition of poetic satire in English that extends from Restoration England to present-day America. This tradition is rooted in John Dryden's and Alexander Pope's uses of Augustan metaphor to criticize the abuse of social and political power...
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Nothing to Admire argues for the persistence of a central tradition of poetic satire in English that extends from Restoration England to present-day America. This tradition is rooted in John Dryden's and Alexander Pope's uses of Augustan metaphor to criticize the abuse of social and political power and to promote an antithetical ideal of satiric authority based on freedom of mind. Because of their commitment to neoclassical conceptions of political virtue, the British Augustans developed a meritocratic cultural ideal grounded in poetic judgment and opposed to the political institutions and practices of their superiors in birth, wealth, and might. Their Augustanism thus gives a political meaning to the Horatian principle of nil admirari. This book calls the resulting outlook cultural liberalism in order to distinguish it from the classical liberal insistence on private property as the basis of political liberty, a conviction that arises within the same general period and often stands in adversarial relation to the Augustan mentality. Dryden and Pope's language of political satire supplies the foundation for the later and more radical liberalisms of Lord Byron, W.H. Auden, and James Merrill, each of whom looks back to the Augustan model for the poetic devices he will use to protest the increasingly conformist culture of mass society. Responding to the banality of this society, the later poets reinvigorate their predecessors' neo-Horatian attitude of skeptical worldliness through iconoclastic comic assaults on the imperial, fascist, heterosexist, and otherwise illiberal impulses of the cultural regimes prevailing during their lifetimes.
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4.

Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama » Read Now
by Femi Euba. 204 pgs.

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In searching for a "definitive concept" of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the "fate god," squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual...
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In searching for a "definitive concept" of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the "fate god," squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire. This is a sophisticated study that will be of great interest to those seeking to understand African influences on black drama and culture.
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5.

Satire in the Victorian Novel » Read Now
by Frances Theresa Russell. 335 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...manifestations of satire itself. Take...characters in literature which seem...ignored. Satire has not only embodied itself in certain characters of literature, but has...
6.

Notes on English Verse Satire » Read Now
by Humbert Wolfe. 158 pgs.

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...LECTURES ON LITERATURE NOTES ON ENGLISH VERSE SATIRE -2- NOTES...PRINTED IN THE UNITED...fustian in literature. For it debauches man in the church...object of satire to...
7.

Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660-1750 » Read Now
by Ian Jack. 163 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Satire » Read Now
by J. P. Sullivan. 186 pgs.

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...ESSAYS ON ROMAN LITERATURE SATIRE Edited...1970 Printed in Great Britain...Renaissance literature. So important...Horaces place in the history of satire that one...
9.

Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and Other Offences in Latin Poetry » Read Now
by John Henderson. 374 pgs.

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Taking particular plays and poems from Roman comic theatre and the genre of Latin satire, this book finds Rome sending up Roman culture - making a mess of drama, jesting at rustic gaucherie, caricaturing the cult of masculine aggression. Writing Down Rome explores the robust poetic of...
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Taking particular plays and poems from Roman comic theatre and the genre of Latin satire, this book finds Rome sending up Roman culture - making a mess of drama, jesting at rustic gaucherie, caricaturing the cult of masculine aggression. Writing Down Rome explores the robust poetic of self-denigration. Henderson's essays celebrate the energetic self-mockery that powers much of Roman poetry. They range widely over comedy, lyric, bucolic, and, in particular, the Roman speciality of satire.
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10.

Not in Timon's Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy, and Satire in Eighteenth-Century England » Read Now
by Thomas R. Preston. 220 pgs.

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...Misanthropy, and Satire in Eighteenth-Century...Humanities No. 9 Literature THE UNIVERSITY...flourish in English literature and literary...of literary satire...
11.

The Epistolary Ethos of Formal Satire, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language » Read Now
by Steven Shelburne. 31 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...11. 2 ( 1981 ): 137-67; Jack D. Winner, "Ben Jonsons Epigrammes and the Conventions of Formal Verse Satire," Studies in English Literature 23 ( 1983 ): 61-76; and esp...
12.

African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel » Read Now
by Darryl Dickson-Carr. 226 pgs.

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Satire's real purpose, as a literary genre, is to criticize through humor, irony, caricature, and parody, and, ultimately, to defy the status quo. In African American Satire, Darryl Dickson-Carr provides the first book-length study of African American satire and the vital role it has played, and in...
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Satire's real purpose, as a literary genre, is to criticize through humor, irony, caricature, and parody, and, ultimately, to defy the status quo. In African American Satire, Darryl Dickson-Carr provides the first book-length study of African American satire and the vital role it has played, and in the process investigates African American literature, American literature, and the history of satire.
Dickson-Carr argues that major works by such authors as Rudolph Fisher, Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and George S. Schuyler should be read primarily as satires in order to avoid misinterpretation and to gain a greater understanding of their specific meanings and the eras in which they were written. He also examines the satirical rhetoric and ideological bases of complex works such as John Oliver Killens's The Cotillion and Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger -- books that are currently out of print and that have received only scant critical attention since they were first published.
Beginning with the tradition of folk humor that originated in West Africa and was forcibly transplanted to the Americas through chattel slavery, Dickson-Carr focuses in each chapter on a particular period of the twentieth century in which the African American satirical novel flourished. He analyzes the historical contexts surrounding African American literature and culture within discrete crucial movements, starting with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ending in the present. He also demonstrates how the political, cultural, and literary ethos of each particular moment is manifested and contested in each text.
By examining these texts closely within their historicaland ideological contexts, Dickson-Carr shows how African American satirical novels provide the reader of African American literature with a critique of popular ideologies seldom found in nonsatirical works. Providing a bett
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