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, Molière, 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.
Charles Knight recently retired as a Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, of which he was one of the founding faculty, and where he still continues to teach. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature; he has written Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: A Reference Guide (1994) and numerous articles for journals such as Modern Language Review, Philological Quarterly, Modern Philology, Comparative Literature and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Acknowledgements; Introduction: the satiric frame of mind; Part I. Satiric Boundaries: 1. Imagination's Cerebrus; 2. Satiric nationalism; 3. Satiric exile; Part II. Satiric Forms: 4. Satire as performance; 5. Horatian performances; 6. Satire and the novel; 7. Literature and the press: the Battle of Dunkirk; 8. White snow and black magic: Karl Kraus and the press; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
"When, after many years of reading, thinking, teaching, and writing, a scholar leaves us a handsome record of what he has learned, we ought to be grateful. It is with such gratitude that we should welcome Charles A. Knight's The Literature of Satire." - Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Leon Guilhamet, CUNY
