Download or read book Menippean Satire Reconsidered written by Howard D. Weinbrot and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-11-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Grotesque Anatomies written by David Musgrave and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pope’s Dunciad among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the longer, more encylopedic form (Varro-Petronius-Boethius), and their subsequent fusion during the Renaissance. It also contains an account of the critical reception of the genre, with the term ‘Menippean satire’ first being used by Justus Lipsius in 1581. Finally, Menippean satire is described as a literary version of the grotesque, and a brief theory of the grotesque in the modern period as ‘radical heterogeneity’ is outlined. This is also the foundation of a new definition of Menippean satire, drawing on previous definitions by Frye, Bakhtin and Kirk, and revising them for the modern period. The following chapters examine iconic works as examples of Menippean satire and of the grotesque. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the nose in Menippean satire and comic literature generally, and reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in this context. It also gives an account of metaphor as a ‘grotesque transformation’. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the stomach in Menippean satire and symposiastic literature, and reads Peacock’s Gryll Grange in this context. The link between the stomach as a figure of thinking in comic literature is the basis for an account of symbolic structuring as ‘grotesque association’. Chapter 4 is a close reading of the scatological imagery of Pope’s Dunciad, and how scatology generally tends towards a cyclical metaphysics. It also relates changes in print technology and copyright laws to the reticular scatological structure of the Dunciad. Chapter 5 argues for Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Menippean satire, focusing on the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme as a missing premise, as an example of ‘under-mindedness’ and as an ironic aspect of the fragmentation typical of late Romantic Menippean satires. Chapter 6 examines Urquhart’s eccentric The Jewel as a satire on the referential function of language, reading it in the context of projections for a universal language from this period. The final chapter identifies some key works by Derrida and Barthes as Menippean satires, noting the resurgence of the form in some postmodern and deconstructive writing.

Download or read book Postcolonial Satire written by Amy L. Friedman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.

Download or read book Christopher Smart and Satire written by Min Wild and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Smart and Satire explores the lively and idiosyncratic world of satire in the eighteenth-century periodical, focusing on the way that writers adopted personae to engage with debates taking place during the British Enlightenment. Taking Christopher Smart's audacious and hitherto underexplored Midwife, or Old Woman's Magazine (1750-1753) as her primary source, Min Wild provides a rich examination of the prizewinning Cambridge poet's adoption of the bizarre, sardonic 'Mary Midnight' as his alter-ego. Her analysis provides insights into the difficult position in which eighteenth-century writers were placed, as ideas regarding the nature and functions of authorship were gradually being transformed. At the same time, Wild also demonstrates that Smart's use of 'Mary Midnight' is part of a tradition of learned wit, having an established history and characterized by identifiable satirical and rhetorical techniques. Wild's engagement with her exuberant source materials establishes the skill and ingenuity of Smart's often undervalued, multilayered prose satire. As she explores Smart's use of a peculiarly female voice, Wild offers us a picture of an ingenious and ribald wit whose satirical overview of society explores, overturns, and anatomises questions of gender, politics, and scientific and literary endeavors.

Download or read book Between Laughter and Satire written by Conal Condren and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores closely related aspects of the historical study of humour. It challenges much that has been taken for granted in a field of study for which history has been marginal. It disputes the conventional genealogical view that humour theory dates from antiquity and outlines an alternative conceptual history. It critically examines the nostrum that humour is universal. It then explores the methodological difficulties in treating both verbal and non-verbal humour historically, dealing with contextualisation, intentionality, translation and reception. It explores the variable relationships between satire and definition and concludes with a detailed case study from recent history: the iconic Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister television comedies. These are commonly seen as realistic, but better understood as presenting popularised theories for satiric and propagandistic effect. Only in their treatment of language can we assess a putative political realism. The satires are often highly perceptive but largely dependent on misleading and inadequate theories of political discourse. Conal Condren is an Emeritus Scientia Professor at UNSW, a member of two Cambridge Colleges and a fellow both of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Social Sciences in Australia. He has published widely and principally in early modern intellectual history. Among his books are The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts; Argument and Authority in Early Modern England; Political Vocabularies: Word Change and the Nature of Politics.

Download or read book Secularisation and the Leiden Circle written by Mark Somos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Leiden Circle pioneered the systematic exclusion of theologically grounded argument in areas of thought from the natural sciences to international relations. Somos uses richly contextualised portraits of Scaliger, Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius to develop a new model of secularisation.

Download or read book Empirical Wonder written by Riccardo Capoferro and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Empirical Wonder" focuses on the emergence of the fantastic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture. To do so, it preliminarily formulates an inclusive theory of the fantastic centering on nineteenth- and twentieth-century genres. The origins of such genres, this study argues, reside in the epistemological shift that attended the rise of empiricism, and their formal and historical identity becomes fully visible against the backdrop of pre-modern culture. While in pre-modern world-views no clear-cut distinction between the natural and the super- or the non-natural existed, the new epistemology entailed the emergence of boundaries between the empirical and the non-empirical, which determined, on the level of literary production, the opposition between the realistic and the non-realistic. Along with these boundaries, however, emerged the need to overcome them. In the seventeenth century, the religious supernatural and the existence of monsters were increasingly being questioned by modern science, and a variety of attempts were made to enact a mediation between what was perceived as unmistakably real and the problematic phenomena that were threatened by the empirical outlook: apparition narratives were used, for instance, to persuade skeptics of the presence of otherworldly beings, and travelogues often presented monsters as if they were empirical entities. Most of these attempts became soon incompatible with scientific culture, more and more normative, so the task of mediation was assumed by literature. Apparition narratives, originally conceived as factual texts, were progressively aestheticized; analogously, imaginary voyages grew different from fictionalized travelogues -- the success of Gulliver's Travels resetting the genre's main conventions and establishing a distinctly fictional model. Both apparition narratives and imaginary voyages emerged as self-consciously literary, that is, aesthetic, genres, bridging the gap between the empirical and the non-empirical. The origins of the fantastic ended when its mediatory task gave way to other concerns. Although on a residual level the mediation between the empirical and the non-empirical persisted, the fantastic's main preoccupations changed: in imaginary voyages its distinctive devices were used to dramatize or validate colonial practices, and Gothic fiction disconnected itself from the moral framework typical of apparition narratives.

Download or read book Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film written by Kirk Combe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

Download or read book Jesting in Earnest written by Derek C. Maus and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical analysis of Percival Everett's oeuvre through the lens of Menippean satire Percival Everett, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the author of more than thirty books on a wide variety of subjects and genres. Among his many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Huston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and the Dos Passos Prize in Literature. Derek C. Maus proposes that the best way to analyze Everett's varied oeuvre is within the framework of Menippean satire, which focuses its ridicule on faulty modes of thinking, especially the kinds of willful ignorance and bad faith that are used to justify corruption, violence, and bigotry. In Jesting in Earnest, Maus critically examines fourteen of Everett's novels and several of his shorter works through the lens of Menippean satire, focusing on how it supports Everett's broader aim of stimulating thoughtful interpretation that is unfettered by common assumptions and preconceived notions.

Download or read book Teaching Modern British and American Satire written by Evan R. Davis and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Download or read book Cynic Satire written by Eric McLuhan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Menippean â " Cynic â " satire is a device for producing a specific kind of effect on the reader. Menippean satire is an active form, not a passive one: any work that produces the effect of a Menippean satire is a Menippean satire. It is the embodiment of a Cynic â " of a Diogenes or a Menippus or a Lucian or a Rabelais. For centuries, it has frustrated the best efforts of critics to define it. Descriptive criteria (such as â oea mixture of verse and proseâ ) invariably fail because the form is determinedly fluid and polymorphous, and playful: it shifts its mode of attack with every change in culture or perception. Menippists plagiarize with abandon, from anyone and any period and culture. McLuhan has found a new and potent method of coming to grips with the satires by examining their interaction with the audience: the satire does what a Cynic would, were he or she physically present. This approach accounts for every shift in technique, from the most ancient (Homer composed one, the Margites) to tomorrow afternoon, and also opens the discussion of Menippism in any and all media other than literature â " TV, digital, film, radio, et al. The book ends with a litmus test for detecting Menippean satires. It is also lavishly illustrated with title pages of some of the most notorious examples in the tradition, and is ideal as a textbook for undergraduates.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell written by Martin Dzelzainis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day—in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.

Download or read book Nordic Utopias and Dystopias written by Pia Maria Ahlbäck and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature written by Aleksondra Hultquist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first critical collection on Delarivier Manley revisits the most heated discussions, adds new perspectives in light of growing awareness of Manley’s multifaceted contributions to eighteenth-century literature, and demonstrates the wide range of thinking about her literary production and significance. While contributors reconsider some well-known texts through her generic intertextuality or unresolved political moments, the volume focuses more on those works that have had less attention: dramas, correspondence, journalistic endeavors, and late prose fiction. The methodological approaches incorporate traditional investigations of Manley, such as historical research, gender theory, and comparative close readings, as well as some recently influential theories, like geocriticism and affect studies. This book forges new paths in the many underdeveloped directions in Manley scholarship, including her work’s exploration of foreign locales, the power dynamics between individuals and in relation to states, sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and the shifting operations and influences of genre. While it draws on previous writing about Manley’s engagement with Whig/Tory politics, gender, and queerness, it also argues for Manley’s contributions as a writer with wide-ranging knowledge of both the inner sanctums of London and the outer developing British Empire, an astute reader of politics, a sophisticated explorer of emotional and gender dynamics, and a flexible and clever stylist. In contrast to the many ways Manley has been too easily dismissed, this collection carefully considers many points of view, and opens the way for new analyses of Manley’s life, work, and vital contributions to the full range of forms in which she wrote.

Download or read book The Practice of Satire in England 1658 1770 written by Ashley Marshall and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.

Download or read book The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time written by Helen Small and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 1840 to the present, it treats cynic confrontationalism as a widely-employed credibility-check on the promotion of moral ideals—with roots in human psychology. Helen Small investigates how writers have engaged with Cynic traditions of thought, and later more gestural styles of cynicism, to re-calibrate dominant moral values, judgements of taste, and political agreements. The argument develops through a series of cynic challenges to accepted moral thinking: Friedrich Nietzsche on morality; Thomas Carlyle v. J. S. Mill on the permissible limits of moral provocation; Arnold on the freedom of criticism; George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford on cosmopolitanism; Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis on the conditions of work in the university. The Function of Cynicism treats topics of present-day public concern: abrasive styles of public argument; debasing challenges to conventional morality; free speech, moral controversialism; the authority of reason and the limits of that authority; nationalism and resistance to nationalism; and liberty of expression as a core principle of the university.

Download or read book Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture written by Manuele Gragnolati and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.