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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 ...

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.

Offering both the first major revision of satiric rhetoric in decades and a critical account of the modern history of satire criticism, Fredric V. Bogel maintains that the central structure of the satiric mode has been misunderstood. Devoting attention to Augustan satiric texts and other examples of ...

Offering both the first major revision of satiric rhetoric in decades and a critical account of the modern history of satire criticism, Fredric V. Bogel maintains that the central structure of the satiric mode has been misunderstood. Devoting attention to Augustan satiric texts and other examples of satire -- from writings by Ben Jonson and Lord Byron to recent performance art -- Bogel finds a complicated interaction between identification and distance, intimacy and repudiation.

Drawing on anthropological insights and the writings of Kenneth Burke, Bogel articulates a rigorous, richly developed theory of satire. While accepting the view that the mode is built on the tension between satirist and satiric object, he asserts that an equally crucial relationship between the two is that of intimacy and identification; satire does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference.

The book provides fresh analyses of eighteenth-century texts by Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and others. Bogel believes that the obsessive play between identification and distance and the fascination with imitation, parody, and mimicry which mark eighteenth-century satire are part of a larger cultural phenomenon in the Augustan era -- a questioning of the very status of the category and of categorical distinctness and opposition.

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 ...

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