Offering both the first major revision of satiric rhetoric in decades and a critical account of the modern history of satire criticism, Fredric V. Bogel maintains that the central structure of the satiric mode has been misunderstood. Devoting attention to Augustan satiric texts and other examples of satire—from writings by Ben Jonson and Lord Byron to recent performance art—Bogel finds a complicated interaction between identification and distance, intimacy and repudiation.Drawing on anthropological insights and the writings of Kenneth Burke, Bogel articulates a rigorous, richly developed theory of satire. While accepting the view that the mode is built on the tension between satirist and satiric object, he asserts that an equally crucial relationship between the two is that of intimacy and identification; satire does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference.The book provides fresh analyses of eighteenth-century texts by Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and others. Bogel believes that the obsessive play between identification and distance and the fascination with imitation, parody, and mimicry which mark eighteenth-century satire are part of a larger cultural phenomenon in the Augustan era—a questioning of the very status of the category and of categorical distinctness and opposition.

"Drawing on anthropological insights and the writings of Kenneth Burke, Bogel articulates a rigorous, richly developed theory of satire. While accepting the view that the mode is built on the tension between satirist and satiric object, he asserts that an equally crucial relationship between the two is that of intimacy and identification; satire does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference.".

Ralph Rosen explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Roman poetry, encouraging a synoptic, synchronic view of such poetry, from archaic iambus through Roman satire.

Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.

This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome. Together, the essays demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought. Competition between diverse groups in Roman society - be it pagans with Christians, Christians with Christians, or pagans with pagans - did create tensions and hostility, but it also allowed for coexistence and reduced the likelihood of overt violent, physical conflict. Competition and coexistence, along with conflict, emerge as still central paradigms for those who seek to understand the transformations of Rome from the age of Constantine through the early fifth century.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world - mechanistic materialism and vitalism - in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

He shows how contemporary satirists mixed the materials of high and low art to create hybrid and provocative images that dealt with a broad range of controversial issues, including alcoholism, the excesses of fashion, financial collapse, freemasonry, political corruption and prostitution."--Jacket.

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.