In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

Satire, though a form of literature familiar to everyone, is difficult to define. Partaking variously of sarcasm, irony, ridicule, and burlesque, it is exactly synonymous with no one of these. Satire is primarily dependent on the motive of its writer. Unless meant for satire, it is not the real thing; unconscious satire is a contradiction of terms, or a mere figure of speech.Secondarily, satire depends on the reader. What seems to us satire to-day, may not seem so tomorrow. Or, what seems satire to a pessimistic mind, may seem merely good-natured chaff to an optimist. This, of course, refers to the subtler forms of satire. Many classic satires are direct lampoons or broadsides which admit of only one interpretation.Literature numbers many satirists among its most honoured names; and the best satires show intellect, education, and a keen appreciation of human nature. Often satire provides best examples of a kindly tolerance for the vice or folly in question, and even hint the acceptance of the conditions condemned. Again in the hands of a carping and unsympathetic critic satire is used with vitriolic effects on sins for which the writer has no mercy.It is the compiler¿s regret that a great mass of material is necessarily omitted for lack of space; other selections are discarded because of their present untimeliness, which deprives them of their intrinsic interest. But an endeavour has been made to represent the greatest and best satiric writers, and also to include at least extracts from the masterpieces of satire.

"Justman considers satire not as a genre but as a potential available to different genres. He contrasts a line of English literature critical of journalism - writers such as Addison, Austen, and Trollope - with another less mannerly, represented by writers who exploded the stock formulas of which so much journalism is made, a line running from Swift through Dickens to Joyce and Orwell. Discussed too is the exploitation of the power of satire in political doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.

Horace's Satires owe debts of influence to a wide range of genres and authors, including, as this study demonstrates, the moral tradition of Epicureanism. Focusing on the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, it argues that the central concerns of his work lie at the heart of the poet's criticisms of Roman society and its shortcomings.

Pharmaceutical salesman Morris Feldstein accidentally puts a non-business charge on his credit card that gets flagged by a government-surveillance-program supercomputer, leading to his becoming public enemy number one.

This volume, from an innovative scholar of Latin Literature and Greek Old Comedy, distills the modern corpus of scholarship on Roman Satire, presenting the genre in particular through the themes of literary ambition, self-fashioning, and poetic afterlife.