The Literature of Satire is an accessible but sophisticated and wide-ranging study of satire from the classics to the present in plays, novels and the press as well as in verse. In it Charles Knight analyses the rhetorical problems created by satire's complex relations to its community, and examines how it exploits the genres it borrows. He argues that satire derives from an awareness of the differences between appearance, ideas and discourse. Knight provides illuminating readings of such satirists familiar and unfamiliar as Horace, Lucian, Jonson, Molière, Swift, Pope, Byron, Flaubert, Ostrovsky, Kundera, and Rushdie. This broad-ranging examination sheds light on the nature and functions of satire as a mode of writing, as well as on theoretical approaches to it. It will be of interest to scholars interested in literary theory as well as those specifically interested in satire.

Literary satire assumes three main forms: monologue, parody, and narrative (some fictional, some dramatic). This book by Gilbert Highet is a study of these forms, their meaning, their variation, their powers. Its scope is the range of satirical literature—from ancient Greece to modern America, from Aristophanes to Ionesco, from the parodists of Homer to the parodists of Eisenhower. It shows how satire originated in Greece and Rome, what its initial purposes and methods were, and how it revived in the Renaissance, to continue into our own era. Contents: Preface. I. Introduction. II. Diatribe. III. Parody. IV. The Distorting Mirror. V. Conclusion. Notes. Brief Bibliography. Index. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Satire, according to Jonathan Swift, is a mirror where beholders generally discover everybody's face but their own. and over twenty-four centuries the mirror of satirical literature has taken on many shapes. Yet certain techniques recur continually, certain themes are timeless, and some targets are perennial. Politics (the mismanagement of men by other men) has always been a target of satire, as has the war between sexes.The universality of satire as a mode and creative impulse is demonstrated by the cross-cultural development of lampoon and travesty. Its deep roots and variety are shown by the persistence of allegory, fable, aphorism, and other literary subgenres. Hodgart analyzes satire at some of its most exuberant moments in Western literature, from Aristophanes to Brecht. His analysis is supplemented by a selection and discussion of prints and cartoons.Satire continues to help us make sense of the conventions that seem to have been almost genetically transmitted from their satiric ancestors to our digital contemporaries. This is especially evident in Hodgart's repeated references to satire's predilection for the ephemeral, for camouflaging itself among the everyday, for speaking to the moment, and thus for integrating itself as deeply as possible into society. Brian Connery's new introduction places Hodgart's analysis in its proper place in the development of twentieth-century criticism.

First published in 1970, this work explores the literary genre of satire. After identifying the definitive aspects of satire, it goes on to examine the subjects which can be susceptible to satire, the modes and means of satire, the tone of satire and the satirist’s relationship with the reader. In doing so, it introduces the reader to a number of key satirical writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. This book presents a comprehensive overview the genre and provides a useful starting point for those wishing to further study satirical literature.

Narrative satire was one of the dominant literary forms of the 18th century, but it came to be displaced by novelistic and historical forms of narrative. Palmeri (English, U. of Miami) argues that these new forms defined themselves in opposition to satire, but also by appropriating elements of satir

Because satire cannot be fixed in a conventional form or genre, it resists analysis, but as David Worcester demonstrates in this lively and helpful book, satirical literature can be showed to have followed a definite evolution, with complex and sublte forms arising out of simple and primitive ones. Mr. Worcester traces the progression of satire from invective to burlesque and from there to the varied modes of irony. He discusses the various forms satire has taken in English literature, and the motives behind its impetus at different periods in its history, and touches on the possibilities of satire and the uses of irony in literature in our own time. 'The Art of Satire' provides both a historical and critical introduction to the uses of literary satire, and in analyzing the technique of irony clarifies one of the most subtle and powerful principles of literary art.