Download or read book All Things Vain written by Robert A. Kantra and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion and satire can be incompatible, even opposed, but they can also join to produce great art. So argues this wide-ranging book, which seeks to identify the essence of religious satire, beginning with the art of such Renaissance figures as Erasmus and Dürer and concluding with such modern writers as Beckett, Eliot, and Waugh. Modern painters and sculptors, though not often concerned with religious satire, may employ its themes--as indeed may practitioners of the "new science" flourishing since Newton. The theme of religious satire, in Kantra's words, is "man's encroachment on the divine--his effort to play God, in whole or in part--whether under the banner of religion or of humanity." Heroic art has the same subject but a different attitude: it celebrates man's pretensions to divinity, whereas religious satire mocks them--sometimes harshly, sometimes gently. "If heroic art is ennobling, satiric art is humbling." Comedy sometimes may be found in satiric works, tragedy never, and tragicomedy always. The book starts with a brief examination of medieval religious satire: the rough shepherds in mystery plays, the lusty clerics in Chaucer, the roof bosses of Gluttony, Lying, and the Devil swallowing Judas Iscariot in Southwark Cathedral. The Renaissance was a golden era for the genre. Dürer engraved Saint Jerome (who wrote satirical letters), his halo off center, in what Kenneth Clark calls "a typically Erasmian room" with the lion and the little dog in the foreground, "sharing a conspicuously self-satisfied contentment." Yet Dürer, according to Erwin Panofsky, "failed when confronted with the small, quiet, supremely ironic face of Erasmus of Rotterdam." But what artist could capture the author of The Praise Folly, who saw self-styled sapient humans as "a swarm of flies and gnatss . . . laying traps for one another?" Kantra contends that the English--Elizabethans, Metaphysicals, Augustans, Victorians, and moderns --have always mixed satire with comedy and tragedy. Donne wrote in Satyre III that "our Mistresse faire religion," can look like "neare twin" to a strumpet. Satire, Milton said, "was born out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage." Consider his Satan and his fallen legions. Chesterton and Belloc lampooned "essentially modern men" who reject magic and religion. Today religious satire is more alive than ever--among both churched writers such as Eliot, Waugh, or Dorothy Sayers, and the unchurched such as Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett --in works that pull down the vanity of modern man's once-proud claim to have conquered nature.

Download or read book God Mocks written by Terry Lindvall and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award In God Mocks, Terry Lindvall ventures into the muddy and dangerous realm of religious satire, chronicling its evolution from the biblical wit and humor of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era and the Middle Ages all the way up to the present. He takes the reader on a journey through the work of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment of modern wags like Stephen Colbert. Lindvall finds that there is a method to the madness of these mockers: true satire, he argues, is at its heart moral outrage expressed in laughter. But there are remarkable differences in how these religious satirists express their outrage.The changing costumes of religious satirists fit their times. The earthy coarse language of Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More during the carnival spirit of the late medieval period was refined with the enlightened wit of Alexander Pope. The sacrilege of Monty Python does not translate well to the ironic voices of Soren Kierkegaard. The religious satirist does not even need to be part of the community of faith. All he needs is an eye and ear for the folly and chicanery of religious poseurs. To follow the paths of the satirist, writes Lindvall, is to encounter the odd and peculiar treasures who are God’s mouthpieces. In God Mocks, he offers an engaging look at their religious use of humor toward moral ends.

Download or read book Milton and Religious Controversy written by John N. King and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

Download or read book The Other End of the Egg written by Martin Kallich and published by New York University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Tale of a Tub and Seventeenth Century English Religious Satire written by Clarence Mertoun Webster and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Sincere Huron Pupil of Nature written by Voltaire and published by Musaicum Books. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Huron, or originally called L'Ingénu is a satirical novel and it tells the story of a Huron called "Child of Nature" who, after having crossed the Atlantic to England, crosses into Brittany, France in the 1690s. Upon arrival, a prior notices depictions of his brother and sister-in-law, whom they deduce to be the Huron's parents - making him French. Having grown up outside of European culture, he sees the world in a more 'natural' way, causing him to interpret things directly, unaware of what is customary, leading to comic misinterpretations. After reading the Bible, he feels he should be circumcised and calls upon a surgeon to perform the operation (which is stopped through the intervention of his 'family'). After his first confession, he tries to force the priest to confess as well - interpreting a biblical verse to mean confessions must be made mutually and not exempting the clergy. Not expecting to be baptized in a church, they find the Child of Nature waiting in a stream, as baptisms are depicted in the Bible. The story satirizes religious doctrine, government corruption, and the folly and injustices of French society. François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

Download or read book Three Prayers and Sermons written by Jonathan Swift and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, and poet known for his anonymity in writing, in this book, shares three prayers, and sermons. He shared clear messages about the Christian dome through sermons with a clear explanation of these subjects including Mutual Subjection, Sleeping in Church, and the Wisdom of the World. This book covers values worth embracing including submission, concentration, knowledge, and intelligence.

Download or read book Foundations for Moral Relativism written by J. David Velleman and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of Foundations for Moral Relativism a distinguished moral philosopher tames a bugbear of current debate about cultural difference. J. David Velleman shows that different communities can indeed be subject to incompatible moralities, because their local mores are rationally binding. At the same time, he explains why the mores of different communities, even when incompatible, are still variations on the same moral themes. The book thus maps out a universe of many moral worlds without, as Velleman puts it, "moral black holes”. The six self-standing chapters discuss such diverse topics as online avatars and virtual worlds, lying in Russian and truth-telling in Quechua, the pleasure of solitude and the fear of absurdity. Accessibly written, this book presupposes no prior training in philosophy.

Download or read book A Satyr Against Hypocrites written by John Phillips and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Satyr Against Hypocrites was John Phillips' anonymous poem entered in the Stationers' Register on March 14, 1654-55 as the work of his brother Edward Phillips. It was considered a bitter attack on Puritanism at that time. A Satyr Against Hypocrites, in reality, was regarded a little more than the irresponsible outburst of an immature man of twenty-three who was tired of discipline, dissatisfied in his expectations of political advancement, and furious with the sort of people who had taken over the country but who seemed incapable of appreciating his peculiar merits. In 1661 A Satyr Against Hypocrites was republished as The Religion of the Hypocritical Presbyterians, which was assumed to be no more than an attempt to lure new interest with a title that would appeal to the post-Restoration preference to criticize the strongest of the Puritan sects. It is believed that John Phillips was an unofficial secretary to Milton but, was unable to obtain regular political employment

Download or read book Betwixt Jest and Earnest written by Raymond A. Anselment and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1979-12-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift are among the best prose satirists in a remarkably rich literary era. Focusing on these key figures, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’ examines the theory and practice of religious prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in attempting to transform unimaginative animadversion into effective satire, it analyses the ways in which Marprelate’s tracts, Milton’s anti-prelatical satires, Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub variously resolve the decorum of religious satire. Although the study is not specifically an intellectual history or a rigid definition of religious attitudes towards jest, it does bring together basic symptoms of altering sensibilities in the period. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift represent diverse religious dispositions, but they share a similar satiric vision. Each recognizes the central importance of manner, and all develop dramatic satire heavily dependent on character, an emphasis which often displaces the immediate issues contested, but never obscures the larger concerns the satirists pursue. Their preoccupations with the nature of tradition, their emphasis on the self, and their sensitivity to language reflect similar involvements in questions of certainty and absolutism. The virtues and abuses they find in such central questions are not unique to them or their time, but their emphases are, for they wrote in an age in which sensitive men could confront revolution and reaction with an assurance not easily attainable once that era had passed.

Download or read book English Verse Satire 1590 1765 written by Raman Selden and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-14 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1978 English Verse Satire aims to provide a critical study of the major English verse satirists as well as an account of the historical development of verse satire. Critical accounts are offered of important writers including Donne, Vaughan, Butler, Rochester, Dryden, Oldham, Swift, Pope, Young, Dr. Johnson and Churchill. An account of verse satire commences historically with the Roman satirists and Dr Selden has provided a substantial treatment of Horace and Juvenal as the basis for a study of the evolution of verse satire from the Elizabethan period to the end of the Augustan period. A special feature of the book is the emphasis on tradition, continuity, and innovation. This book is an interesting read for scholars of English literature.

Download or read book Satire in the Early English Drama written by Eva Marie Campbell and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster written by Bobby Henderson and published by Villard. This book was released on 2010-04-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can I get a “ramen” from the congregation?! Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM’ s devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s “noodly appendage.” Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb. Still others are drawn to the Church’s flimsy moral standards, religious holidays every Friday, or the fact that Pastafarian heaven is way cooler: Does your heaven have a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano? Intelligent Design has finally met its match—and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden. Within these pages, Bobby Henderson outlines the true facts– dispelling such malicious myths as evolution (“only a theory”), science (“only a lot of theories”), and whether we’re really descended from apes (fact: Humans share 95 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but they share 99.9 percent with pirates!) See what impressively credentialed top scientists have to say: “If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory.” –Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D. “Do not be hypocritical. Allow equal time for other alternative ‘theories’ like FSMism, which is by far the tastier choice.” –J. Simon, Ph.D. “In my scientific opinion, when comparing the two theories, FSM theory seems to be more valid than classic ID theory.” –Afshin Beheshti, Ph.D. Read the book and decide for yourself!

Download or read book Religion and the English People 1500 1640 written by Eric Josef Carlson and published by Truman State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings to the fore new topics and a new and active generation of Reformation scholars. The relationship between the clergy and laity receives long-overdue attention, and the impact of early preaching, religious satire, and the Book of Common Prayer is addressed. Use of more sophisticated and reliable sources such as wills also adds to the new scholarship.

Download or read book English Satire and Satirists written by Hugh Walker and published by London and Toronto : J.M. Dent & sons lts ; New York : E. P. Dutton & Company. This book was released on 1925 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Graphic Satire and Religious Change written by Joke Spaans and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent research in early modern print media and the early enlightenment have dramatically changed the way we look at the Dutch Republic in the later seventeenth century. For a long time, this was an underresearched area. Interdisciplinary approaches now demonstrate how a dense, varied, and for its time, technically advanced media landscape managed to involve intellectuals, politicians and craftsmen in debates on current issues. Based on a small corpus of enigmatic satirical prints, so far overlooked by art historians and historians of religion alike, this book explores how polarization between theological schools during the reign of stadholder William III triggered, necessarily covert, debates on the shortcomings of early modern Churches that prepared the way for a more enlightened religious culture.

Download or read book The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain written by Mark Knights and published by Boydell Press is. This book was released on 2017 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars show how laughter and satire in early modern Britain functioned in a variety of contexts both to affirm communal boundaries and to undermine them.