Menippean Satire Reconsidered - From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Hardcover)

Despite the long history of Menippean satire from antiquity to early modern Europe, the genre often has resisted precise definition and has evoked critical controversy. In this magisterial work, Howard D. Weinbrot offers a new and lucid account of the complex literary form. He argues that in the wake of twentieth-century critics, notably Frye and Bakhtin, Menippean satire has been too broadly associated with philosophic ideas expressed in dialogic voices or languages. He proposes instead more rigorous but fluid criteria that incorporate several key elements: the use of varied historical periods, voices, languages, or genres that challenge a threatening orthodoxy; an outcome either of failure and the satirist's renewed anger, or a softer response in which the satirist at least firmly resists the orthodoxy; and the use of one or more specifically identified rhetorical devices within the work and its historical context. operate within the literatures of classical Rome and seventeenth - and eighteenth-century France and England, considering major texts by Varro, Petronius, Lucian, the French and English Menippean satirists, Swift, Boileau, Pope, and Richardson.