Parody in Literature: A Culture-Determined View

Abstract

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.