Satire has been with us since at least the Greeks and is a staple
of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin now moves away from the
prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty years ago to
a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the
tradition of formal verse satire. Exploring texts from Aristophanes
to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century,
Griffin uses a dozen major figures - Horace, Juvenal, Persius,
Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and
Byron - as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a
mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a
comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of
his topics are traditional in satire criticism: the role of the
satirist as moralist; the nature of satiric rhetoric; and the
impact of satire on the political order. Others are new: the
problems of satire and closure; the pleasure it affords readers and
writers; and the socioeconomic status of the satirist. Griffin
concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and
ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its
political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask
questions than to provide answers, and ambivalent about the
pleasures it offers. Here is the ideal introduction to satire for
the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to
reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of
contemporary theory.
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