Richard Steele is famous as an early writer of sentimental drama and as half of the writing team, Addison and Steele. He is notable both for the indirect propaganda he developed with Addison and for the open partisanship of his own periodicals. He wrote extensively about responsible economics but was famously irresponsible in his own affairs.

Richard Steele is famous as an early writer of sentimental drama and as half of the writing team, Addison and Steele. He is notable both for the indirect propaganda he developed with Addison and for the open partisanship of his own periodicals. He wrote extensively about responsible economics but was famously irresponsible in his own affairs.

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, Moliere, 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.

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, Moliere, Swift, Pope, Byron, Flaubert, Ostrovsky, Kundera, and Rushdie. This broad-ranging examination sheds new 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.