Verse Satire Research Articles

A Stroll with Lucilius: Horace, Satires 1.9 Reconsidered

This article argues that the "bore" who pursues Horace in Satires 1.9 should be read as Lucilius, the inventor of Roman verse Satire. This reconsideration of the interlocutor allows certain previously puzzling aspects of the poem, in particular Horace's failure to escape from his companion, to be understood in programmatic terms. The poem literally enacts the complex and timeless dance between successor and model: as long as he is writing satire, Horace cannot be free of Lucilius' presence, and yet to succeed as a satirist he must struggle for a certain measure of independence from his predecessor.

The Light Genre of Stalinism: Soviet Folklore and Its Discontents

Some characteristic examples of early Soviet chastushki, satirical folk verses which were propagated in the first decades of Soviet power as one of the main genres of popular entertainment, are discussed. A combination of the serious and the comic, the acceptable and the obscene made officially sanctioned (and possibly created explicitly for propagandistic purposes) chastushki into an indispensable discursive tool in the training of ideal Soviet citizens. It is argued that the possibility of a subversive reading of the texts, and of the Soviet reality itself, was integrated into the widely popularized texts, and thus rendered harmless. This mechanism of integrating the subversive into the voice of power was something that 'low' genres such as chastushki had in common with 'high' genres of state propaganda, which makes the short verses an especially instructive subject of analysis.

<em>Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print:</em> Belgravia <em>and Sensationalism</em>, by Alberto Gabriele<br/><em>Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade</em>, by Richard Fantina

Reviewed by: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism, and: Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade Natalie Schroeder (bio) Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism, by Alberto Gabriele; pp. xxvii + 275. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $85.00. Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade, by Richard Fantina; pp. x + 205. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £55.00, $85.00. Alberto Gabriele's Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and Richard Fantina's Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade both address the genre of sensation fiction and the cultural trope of sensationalism, but otherwise the works are quite different in approach. Gabriele's major focus is on periodical publication, and extends beyond Victorian fiction to advertisements, French sensationalism of the 1880s, and early-twentieth-century silent film. Fantina's book, on the other hand, is an in-depth study of a neglected but nevertheless significant novelist, Charles Reade. Both books are noteworthy contributions to scholarship on a genre that was marginalized in the nineteenth century, but which has sparked the interest of literary critics in the last twenty-five years. [End Page 577] Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print opens with a diachronic history of Belgravia from 1866 to 1876, the years Mary Elizabeth Braddon edited the magazine, and then it "adopts a synchronic perspective in the study of the reader's response to print culture" (xviii). Gabriele argues that each issue of Belgravia, which was named for the upscale London neighborhood, juxtaposed fiction with nonfiction journalism, poetry, advertising, and illustrations in order to "reproduce the fragmentation of urban modernity through the ephemeral associations created in the reader's minds by scattered findings about world exhibits, bric-a-brac treasures, historical neighborhoods of London, satirical poetry, fashions of the day, installments of serialized novels, and episodic narratives contained in the advertisements" (61). He then moves on to discuss the genre of sensation fiction by outlining the narrative functions of novels by Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Ellen Wood. He shows how these writers challenge "the stable structure of nineteenth-century class relations and, while evoking anxiety about social mobility, demystify bourgeois pretense to moral superiority" (46). He points to the role Belgravia played in the history of the British press, discussing the audience created by periodical publication for controversial and otherwise fascinating topics. Chapter 4 points to the fragmentation that the reader of the periodical press faced. In Gabriele's account, the seemingly unrelated narratives circulated by sensationalism in its various forms in fact performed the coherent project of helping to "spread and naturalize the logic of market economy and the ambitions of imperial expansion" (81). He examines Braddon's anonymously published Bound to John Company (1868-69) in relation to commodity culture. The novel—which includes lists of objects, like Braddon's other works—"employs sensational narrative functions to deconstruct the tenets of British history that were arranged in a way to build a proud colonial narrative to identify with" (107). It criticizes the British war effort in India during the Sepoy Rebellion and "questions and to some degree demystifies the prestige associated to the consumption of oriental commodities" (12). Gabriele also considers sensationalism in its influence on nineteenth-century spectacles, such as the magic lantern show. Visual spectacles are similar to Braddon's novels in their shocking effects, punctuating "each installment with some extraordinary event" (122). A comparison of Braddon's work to the sensationalism in Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent film, Les Vampires, and particularly of Braddon's popular heroines, Lucy Audley and Aurora Floyd, to the film heroine, Irma Vep—illustrates "the persistence of narrative models and characters of Victorian novels in the silent film industry beyond the sheer adaptation of popular novels" (12). The last chapter moves to sensation fiction imported from France in the 1880s, with an emphasis on the detective novels of Émile Gaboriau and a discussion of the differences between the effects of monthly and daily publication formats. The book ends rather abruptly without a conclusion, but includes an excellent appendix with a useful index of the contents of Belgravia from...

Un Carnaval des Dieux à L'épreuve de la Modernité: Parodies et Jeux Avec la Mythologie dans L'œuvre Poétique de Banville

The considerable contribution which Banville made to the nineteenth century's rediscovery of ancient Greece has not received the critical attention it deserves, and yet it is not only in Les Exilés, one of the monuments of the Parnassian movement, that mythology and Greek antiquity play a role. Indeed, in satirical verse such as the Odes funambulesques, Banville plays with a burlesque or melancholic mythology as a means of explaining the modern world. Thus his poetry offers the spectacle of an eccentric, heroi-comic Paris where ordinary characters are transfigured by the use of myth, the vices of the Second Empire are derided, and fallen gods appear as drunkards and rag-pickers. The constant dialogue between myth and modernity provides the aesthetic foundation of Banville's oeuvre, with its surprising, clownish and anachronistic associations of ideas, where the clash between the mythological ideal and the trivialities of contemporary Paris proves an instrument of socio-political satire.

Romeo at the Rose in 1598

In two plays of the Lord Admiral’s Men, Englishmen for My Money and The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, echoes of Romeo and Juliet appear. The first performances of both plays took place at the Rose in or very close to 1598. What may the presence of these echoes have to say about the ethos and practices of the Lord Admiral’s Men, about the dramatists who wrote for them, and about the company’s place in the literary and dramatic milieu within which it operated? It suggests a degree of integration into urban literary fashion. And it suggests that some at least of the company’s playwrights exhibited the kind of knowing playfulness that was soon to characterize the repertory of the childrens’ companies and which was already shaping the erotic and satirical poetry to reach print publication at this time.

Équivoque et ironie dans la poésie satirique contre la cantatrice Anna Zamperini à Lisbonne (1772)

Célèbre cantatrice italienne, Anna Zamperini est arrivée au Portugal en 1772 et fut bien vite l’objet et la victime de poésies satiriques lui reprochant ses mœurs peu vertueuses. Si cette critique s’exprime de façon explicite et sans détours sous la plume de certains poètes, elle ne manque pas de saveur dans des poèmes de caractère ironique dont l’expression bifide implique une lecture plus fine qui sache reconnaître l’équivocité des mots. On perçoit l’équivoque non seulement dans la forme mais aussi dans l’intention « politique » du poète : le discours satirique, d’expression apparemment libre, obéit de facto à l’idéologie du pouvoir pombalin en matière de morale et d’identité nationale, deux concepts intimement liés, comme on tentera de le montrer dans cette étude.

Gurruminos, petimetres, abates y currutacos en el teatro breve del siglo XVIII

This study of certain negative models of sainetes [afterpieces] from the 18th century reveals not only a continuity of comic stereotypes, but also their relationship to the ideals of behaviour of the era: the authority of the husband, the submissiveness of the wife, thriftiness in managing household finances, etc. Afterpieces join other literary genres (journalism, satirical poetry and the moral essay) in ridiculing those who are involved in the practice of cortejo and who readily adopt new forms of social behavior, fashions, foreign dances, etc., in contrast to traditional ways and tastes. Examples taken from Antonio de Zamora, Agramont, Ramon de la Cruz, Vazquez and Gonzalez del Castillo are used to illustrate this reticence towards changes in mentality of a new culture of leisure, as well as to observe it a contrario : its “feminization”, its frivolity, and its uselessness.

Lampatho's 'Delicious Sweet' in Marston's What You Will

WHO, if anybody, is being satirized through the character Lampatho Doria in John Marston’s What You Will? Critics often take the play to have been a part of the literary dispute known as the ‘Poets’ War’. This confrontation came to a climax in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, opposing ventures in which Jonson, Dekker, and Marston were each depicted on stage. Both of these plays were written and staged in 1601 and critics assume that What You Will was composed in the same year, although it did not reach print publication until 1607.1 Lampatho Doria is a gallant who immerses himself in a series of intellectual or anti-intellectual fads. His principal rival, competitor, friend, and social peer is Quadratus. Aspects of Lampatho fit neatly with known characteristics of Ben Jonson and those commentators who choose to view the play in the light of the ‘Poets’ War’ most often see Jonson as Marston’s target and Lampatho as the vehicle for Marston’s satire upon Jonson.2 Some critics have disagreed and consider Lampatho to be a self-portrait: Quadratus calls Lampatho ‘you Don Kinsayder’ (531), using the name Marston adopted for the spokesman of his verse satires of 1598, and this allusion features in the arguments of those who take this view.3 Yet other readers detect in Marston a less straightforward aim, and Lampatho has been termed ‘a teasing anamorphic double-portrait’.4

Darwin's Dharma

Darwin's Dharma Barry Wallenstein (bio) Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie Philip Appleman Illustrations by Arnold Roth Foreword by X. J. Kennedy The Quantuck Lane Press http://www.quantucklanepress.com 96 pages; cloth, $24.95 Philip Appleman is a multifaceted person of letters—poet, novelist, co-founder of the journal Victorian Studies, and editor of both Norton's Malthus on Population (1976) and Darwin (1970). His ongoing interests in science and society have fed his work from the beginning. Alongside this new book of satirical verse, Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie, I have Appleman's first book of poems, the 1967 Kites on a Windy Day. Thematic and even stylistic unities extend from that early book through eight collections, as does his technical achievement. In 1984 when reviewing his fourth book of poetry, Darwin's Ark, I found his work to be among the most alive in the US, as well as being socially responsible, as it looked out beyond the self. Nonetheless, the sensual individual informs everything as the poems delve into the larger universe of our shared evolutionary history. The fact that Appleman is a master of fixed forms—the sonnet, the rhymed epigram, and more—further enhances the poetry as his art moves beyond its ideas or intellect. This new book is an elegant production with nicely chosen epigraphs from Herodotus and T.S. Eliot, both authors making a case for humorous and irreverent poetry that delights with rhymes, puns, and wit. The buoyant forward by poet X. J. Kennedy paraphrases E. B. White when he states "a writer of comic verse works just as hard as a serious poet." Arnold Roth's pen and ink illustrations match Appleman's satirical verse perfectly. They are as lusty and rollicking, and they vary from literal renderings of the writing to imaginative take-offs. Kennedy, a person of faith, almost forgivingly understates the case: "Several of the poems wax skeptical about established beliefs and observances, and smack of secular freethinking." Indeed, in its opposition to blind faith, Appleman's work is atop the anti-religious wave that includes other recent authors attacking theisms: Bart Ehrman, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher's documentary film, Religulous (2008). Appleman's poems in Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie are solidly within the satiric tradition, rhythmically and consistently lambasting the current state of warfare backed by religion. The risk always with unashamedly didactic verse taking on either religion, the engineers of war, or capitalism, or any ism, is that the prime audience for such stuff is already on the poet's side, and while the verse might urge readers towards action or at least a change of mind/heart, most will simply nod their heads in agreement. Thus, the success of such poetry lies exclusively in the originality and inventiveness of the poet rather than his or her attitudes or point of view. Only occasionally does Appleman fall short of that necessary unique expression. Often, another necessity with poetry of social protest is a cross current of something quite dissimilar to the poem's argument. Here, this requirement is happily satisfied by an erotic filament that lights up the work and transforms it from instruction into something more encompassing and touching. This erotic awareness includes all measures of love as the poet's humanity informs most every shout of protest. Appleman's love of the generative life, the life of the senses, his not wanting to give any of it up, is what makes him so angry toward the forces of war, moral certitude, and negation. At the same time, there is an equanimity beneath the palpable anger—a paradox residing peacefully under the biting satire and his raunchy sexuality. Walter Kerr (1913–1996), wonderful theater critic for The New York Times for many years, has commented: The timing of satire is a ticklish business…[the satirist] is always in danger of being severely burned. Let him strike a moment too soon—before the audience is ready to share his malice—and his satire will be resented, driven off the boards. Let him strike a moment too late and he will be laboring the obvious or flyting the already forgotten. He gets a...

Grotesque Bodies: Insulting Conversos and Women in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa

Grotesque Bodies: Insulting Conversos and Women in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa Barbara F. Weissberger Louise O. Vasvári In his 1999 book of essays titled Cogitus interruptus, Juan Goytisolo criticizes the Spanish literary canon created in the late nineteenth century by “ideólogos retrocastizos” like Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and the generation of ‘98 (123). In particular, he laments the exclusion from that canon of Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa, a popular sixteenth-century collection of satirical poetry. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s prudish judgment that the verse contained therein is “cínico, grosero y soez” (126) has led to its unjustified critical neglect.1 Goytisolo rightly points out that the sexual and ethnic vilification that fills the pages of that cancionero is an hilo conductor that leads directly to the picaresque, the poetry of Quevedo, and other works [End Page 259] enshrined as masterpieces of Spanish literature (130–31). This essay responds to Goytisolo’s call to give the aggressive “dissing” contests of the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa (= Burlas) their cultural due.2 Burlas was first published in 1511 as the final section of Hernando del Castillo’s monumental Cancionero general. Despite–or because of–being relegated to the back of the book, the inventive invectives of the Burlas section proved to be very popular. It was reprinted, with various additions and deletions, in subsequent editions of Cancionero general throughout the first half of the sixteenth century and was published separately in 1519. It is this edition that I will focus on here.3 Most of the satirical poems included in Burlas were occasional compositions by noblemen, courtiers, and professional poets associated with the court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504). Like the invenciones, a courtly genre created for tournaments, and also assiduously collected by Castillo in his Cancionero general, the insult contests were no doubt first recited at festive court celebrations or entertainments.4 They were by no means simple escapist [End Page 260] entertainment, however. Rather, like the lyrics written in a higher register in the same cancionero, their composition and performance served a very serious purpose, namely the production and maintenance of masculine identity and status. As Julian Weiss has discussed, in the highly competitive environment of the royal court, demonstrating one’s ability to versify elegantly and wittily was an important means toward gaining social standing among one’s peers and possibly winning favors from the monarchs. Love lyrics are privileged vehicles for the creation of such a prestigious self-fashioning (“Álvaro de Luna”; The Poet’s Art). Written in a provocatively, at times shockingly, low register, the insults traded back and forth in Burlas by some of the very same poets who write eloquently of love, serve a similar function of building social status by disparaging others. Given that roughly one third of all pieces in the cancioneros involve one poet writing against one another, what Mark D. Johnston has called the “fundamentally oppositional character” (249) of such verse cannot be ignored. Although, as he points out, it is difficult to construct five centuries later all of the social, economic, and political distinctions that operate in and around each occasional lyric, we can study the broad categories these literary antagonists use as strategies of “positioning” (251). Of the many categories deployed–ignorant peasant, bad poet, sexual deviant, among others–I will deal with two of the most frequent: “Jew” and “whore”. Medievalists Kathleen Biddick and Steven F. Kruger have persuasively demonstrated the intersection of categories of identity such as gender and sexuality with others such as ethnicity and race in the discursive stigmatization of undesirable others. Biddick situates gender within a “theory of borders” that enables us to talk about the historical construction and maintenance of sexual boundaries that in turn help create cultural categories in the Middle Ages. Her theory historicizes gender in relation to other engendered categories given as “natural” in medieval discourses and hitherto taken for granted by historians. Critical studies of medieval gender would use these tools to work simultaneously as histories of other foundational categories imagined in the invention of Europe, especially “Christendom”, Corpus Christi...

Maria Plaza: The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire .

Maria Plaza: The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire. Laughing and Lying. Oxford: Oxford UP 2006. 370 S. 55 £.

A philosophical interpretation of the significance of oral forms in I. Mabasa’s novel <i>Mapenzi</i> (1999)

The article critically analyses the use of Shona oral art forms in I. Mabasa’s novel “Mapenzi” (“Mad people”/“Foolish people”). It departs from the realisation that the writer identifies with Shona people’s oral experiences in the form of songs, “bembera” (satiric poetry) and folktales among others. These oral art forms provide the means by which the writer overcomes both selfcensorship and real or imagined state censorship. The article advances the argument that Mabasa uses the Shona people’s oral art forms in a manner that is ideologically and pedagogically empowering. This is consistent with the value thrust of Shona people’s epistemological assumptions. The article comes to the conclusion that Mabasa’s vision in the novel “Mapenzi” maintains the line between tradition and continuity.

Le Parnasse et le Palais: L'OEuvre de Furetiere et la genese du premier dictionnaire encyclopedique en langue francaise (1649-1690)

Furetière has had a mixed press, partly because of the quarrel surrounding the publication of his Dictionnaire universel and the charge of plagiarism and theft from the Academy, and partly because of the uneven quality of his previous publications. Compared with Régnier as regards his satirical works, with Scarron for his burlesque or with Sorel for his novels, Furetière has been found wanting. To cite Rey, ‘Du burlesque le plus grossier à la pédagogie sagement chrétienne, Furetière n'a pas su choisir son registre personnel’. In her comprehensive — indeed at times somewhat overlong — study, Roy-Gabriel argues that Furetière's oeuvre must be considered as a whole and that his previous publications prepare the ground for his later encyclopaedic dictionary of French. Moreover, each is shaped by the dual influences of the Parnasse and the Palais: just as the influence of his legal career is discernible in the literary works so, Roy-Gabriel maintains, the Dictionnaire displays inherently literary qualities. In Part I, the author examines in turn Furetière's Ænéide travestie, satirical verse, Nouvelle allégorique and Le Roman bourgeois: each foreshadows his later preoccupations whether as regards the desire for a universal vocabulary which challenges the limits of bel usage, the fascination with the complexity of meaning and the interplay of concrete and figurative senses or the interest in providing definitions, notes and glosses as illustrated in the marginalia of the Nouvelle allégorique. The chapter on Le Roman bourgeois illustrates well the strengths, but also the potential weaknesses, of trying to view the earlier texts as precursors to the lexicographic endeavour. Of the ten points of resemblance listed between the novel and the dictionary, some are entirely convincing, such as the similarities in the choice of motifs and images, the organisation of the works or the preoccupation with the ‘real’, with introducing facts and figures, the evidence necessary to prove a case. Others, such as the claim that the works share the same vocabulary, seem more banal. Part II discusses Furetière's debt to the Academy despite the fundamental differences between his dictionary and the Academy's first edition with respect to what vocabulary is to be included, the use of citations, and indeed the encyclopaedic nature of the definitions which counteract the circularity of purely linguistic definitions. Roy-Gabriel argues that between the Essais of 1684 and the Dictionnaire universel of 1690 the encyclopaedic quality of the dictionary is enhanced through, for example, the addition of etymological material. She demonstrates convincingly how the dictionary is rooted in its age, whether we consider the introduction of contemporary information from official texts or journals, its sceptical tone, or indeed its normative outlook: despite the encyclopaedic quality of the work and the openness to language of all types and registers, the use of style labels and other marques d'usage betrays a certain normative stance. In the final part the author discusses the literary qualities of the dictionary, what she terms the ‘poétique de la curiosité’, and shows how the dictionary is also a deeply personal work, delighting in the marvellous and the curious, and deploying irony, contradiction and hyperbole to create a ‘style Furetière’.

The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying (review)

Reviewed by: The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying Catherine Keane Maria Plaza . The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 370. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-928111-4. This book presents a comparative anatomy of humor strategies in Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Plaza argues that humor is a site of the paradoxes and tensions of the satiric genre, and specifically its repeated failure to deliver the satisfying, morally justified criticism it promises. This idea has appeared in politically and culturally oriented interpretations of satire, and this book's text and notes are packed with summaries, evaluations, and syntheses of such studies. Plaza, however, focuses on words, images, and their intended effects on a reader of unspecified cultural background. In the introduction, Plaza observes that relatively few scholars of Roman satire have drawn on humor theory, or even treated humor as a generic element to analyze in itself. She explicates several ancient and modern theories and integrates them with the persona theory of Kernan and his followers. The latter is more or less the dominant paradigm in Roman satire studies, but as Plaza rightly notes, in some ways it is still incomplete and [End Page 111] misleading. Her own argument makes good use of Kernan's original ideas: she proposes that the "paradoxes" of the persona and of self-undermining programmatic jokes should direct us to look not for the poets' real opinions, but for multiple impulses and strategies of humor throughout their satire. These do not balance one another harmoniously but form a genre-defining "dynamic whirlpool" (22). The three main chapters deal with distinct types of humor: "object-oriented" (ch. 1), "persona-oriented" or self-undermining (ch. 2), and "non-aligned," that is, humor that seems tangential to a satire's message (ch. 3). In each chapter, Plaza treats the three satirists in turn, developing interpretations of select images and poems that reflect particular types of humor. Her readings point to many interesting patterns, such as the satirists' tendency to depict their objects as elevated or inflated before attacking them, and the meaningful play between positive and negative images of the persona. At times, however, the reviews of secondary literature and repeated cross-referencing slow the discussion down and diminish the impact of Plaza's conclusions. In Plaza's diachronic account of the Roman genre, satire initially makes the ambiguous persona a frequent target of humor, but gradually focuses more on external targets. Non-aligned humor remains, but skips a generation; it does not fit Persius' program of "moral-philosophical improvement of society and mankind" (302). Although is it certainly difficult to fit Persius into any mold, it is disappointing to see him disappear from the last third of the book in this way, bearing the old label of earnest teacher. Juvenal's satire is also summed up with a surprising label: the poet held a "deterministic world-view" (126). More appealingly, Plaza also perceives in Juvenal a fascination with the power of "monsters" who inspire both horror and awe. The last satirist creates a universe that reflects satire's exploration of extremes and cultivates an "apocalyptic" mood (306). Plaza occasionally invokes the European novel as the genre that inherits Juvenal's vision and his strategies of non-aligned humor. At times this book disappoints both as an analysis of humor per se and as an analysis of the satirists. Satiric humor is indeed under-theorized, but Plaza's solution seems incomplete. If humor can be called dangerous or tension-filled, it must (at least sometimes) have something to do with what lies outside the text. But this study does not have much to say about satire's multifaceted cultural and political commentary, or the contexts of its individual authors. Some references are made as part of exposition, not interpretation, as exemplified by the casual and inaccurate reference to the Caesar in Horace 2.1 as "Augustus" (41). Regarding more mechanical matters, despite the exhaustive survey of secondary literature throughout, there were some surprising omissions from the bibliography (e.g., F. Bellandi, Etica Diatribica e Protesta Sociale nelle Satire di Giovenale [Bologna 1980...

Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration ‘Leonine’

The eminence as neo-Latin epigrammists of John Owen, Thomas Campion, Sir John Stradling and Charles Fitzgeoffrey has made them essential to any comprehensive understanding of literary satire in the early-seventeenth century.1 Through their use of an international language, they may well have reached a larger readership than most other verse written in Britain at that time. Yet, for the Restoration period, neo-Latin satire seems to be regarded by most present-day scholars as an insignificant pastime of dons and eruditi. University burlesque orations in the 'Terrae filius' tradition were quite widely circulated in manuscript and Richard Braithwaite's Barnabae Itinerarium (London, 1636) still has readers, at least for the engaging English parallel text added in 1638, but Henry Bold's Latine Songs with their English and Poems (London, 1685) was found of so little interest that the LION archive omits the Latin entirely, retaining only the English parallel versions, many of which are not by Bold.2 Insofar as any serious scholarly attention is now given to post-Owen neo-Latin verse satire, it is to the occasional efforts in quantitative metres of poets who were also prominent in the vernacular, and even this interest peters out after 1660. The reason is that no major poet in English during the half-century following Milton, Cowley and Marvell has left a substantial body of Latin verse. Dryden contributed only minor examples and Rochester's one student effort was probably ghosted.3 Anthony Alsop and Vincent Bourne in the eighteenth century were not significant writers in their native language.Yet study of the contents of the manuscript anthologies and personal miscellanies that are our principal sources for Restoration clandestine satire suggests that Latin satirical verse continued to be collected and written not only by dons but by university educated state functionaries, and that its exchange was a significant means by which friendships and alliances were maintained at court, in the law, in the church, and in parliament. Henry Bold, a Chancery official, is himself an example. The personal miscellanies of the courtier Sir William Haward, the Cambridge don John Watson, and the Non-conformist baronet, Sir John Pye, discussed in my English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702, all contain a good representation of neo-Latin verse of a predominantly social nature.4 The more widely circulated examples listed in the first-line index published with that study are mostly epigrams, partly of native and partly foreign origin.5 The most copied foreign items arise from entries written for a competition sponsored by Louis XIV for a distich to be inscribed over the entrance to the Louvre colonnade brought to completion by Perrault in 1671. The winning entry, by George Gordon, fourth Marquis of Huntly and later Duke of Gordon, circulated in the form:Non orbis gentem non urbem gens habet ullaUrbsve domum Dominum vel domus ulla parem.6[The world has no comparable people, no people such a city, no city such a palace, nor any palace such a master.]This soon attracted a motley appendix of other entries, additional poems praising Louis XIV, and Latin and English parodies and responses, which crop up in varying combinations. Marvell and Rochester both contri buted to this corpus. Marvell has left us six entries for the prize, grouped as 'Inscribenda Luparae'.7 Rochester's contribution was an English version of a Latin response to a distich praising the rapidity of Louis' conquests in the campaigns of 1670-72:You Lorraine stole; by fraud you gott Burgundy,And Holland bought by God you'l pay for't one day.8Accumulations of Luparan satire are to be found in Bodleian MS Additional B 106, fols 7v-9r and Bodleian Library, MS Smith 27, pp. 47-48a, and lesser ones in British Library Additional MS 18,220, fols 74r, 91r; Bodleian MS Sancroft 18, p. 4; and Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 69, fol. 57. A second continental current transmitted anti-Papal epigrams originally posted on the statues of Pasquin and Marforio in Rome. …

Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century by Howard D. Weinbrot

113 of those writings and to say why at least some of Defoe’s early works should continue to be read by nonspecialists,’’ which is the void that his book fills. On the vexed question of attributions of anonymous works to Defoe, Mr. Richetti employs the evenhanded strategy of accepting as Defoe’s those titles that Furbank and Owens regard as ‘‘probable’’ and that Novak considers as certainly by Defoe. He assumes, with Novak, that Defoe took a hand in Applebee’s Weekly Journal, but is cautious in his use of that connection. He is even gently witty at the expense of his subject, remarking of one of Defoe’s pamphlets that the effect of reading it is ‘‘rather like Ravel’s ‘Bolero,’ intense, relentless, and at length annoying.’’ This is an urbane, wellinformed , and interesting account, not only of Defoe but of the entire Defoe enterprise . Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University-Camden HOWARD D. WEINBROT. Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005. Pp. xvi ⫹ 375. $60. Since Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and the translation of the work of M. M. Bakhtin into English in the 1980s, ‘‘Menippean satire’’ has become the genre of genres to literary studies. The variety, inclusivity, and mimicry of Menippean satire has made this a most convenient label for works that refuse to fit easily into any other generic category. Mr. Weinbrot feels that we have reached a point at which the question of what isn’t a Menippean satire has rendered the term less than useful. He considers the origins of Menippean satire in Greek and Latin antiquity, its continuation in the Renaissance (represented by the French Satyre Ménippée and its English translation) and the reception of this tradition in eighteenth-century Britain. After laying this groundwork briefly, the bulk of this study essentially considers four major English works published between 1704 and 1748 (the exception being a chapter on Boileau’s 1674 Art Poëtique and its English reception): Swift’s complete A Tale of a Tub volume, Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and The Dunciad, and Richardson ’s Clarissa. While these chapters are substantial and draw on many lesser works of the period, including responses to the major works, this is an extremely narrow canon by which to define a genre—especially one as sprawling as Mr. Weinbrot ’s own major exemplars suggest it to be. Nevertheless, Mr. Weinbrot explicitly narrows the Menippean canon by both formal and moral measures: Menippean satire is ‘‘a kind of satire that uses at least two different languages, genres, tones, or cultural or historical periods to combat a false and threatening orthodoxy.’’ Thus, formally, Mr. Weinbrot posits two ‘‘tones,’’ or degrees , of Menippean satire—‘‘severe’’ and ‘‘muted’’—and four modes: Menippean satire by addition, by genre, by annotation, and, in a special case that recognizes the presence of Menippean satire within a work of a recognizably different genre, Menippean satire by incursion. The eighteenth-century texts that constitute the bulk of the book’s subject matter are mapped out according to this grid. This formal definition is quite capacious—subject to hybrid combinations of different varieties and tones, and, in its last variety, as open to symbiotic (or parasitic) relationships to 114 ‘‘host’’ genres as Bakhtin could ever wish. In moralizing his song, Mr. Weinbrot imposes significant limitations upon the genre: ‘‘It is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it.’’ Some of the customary exemplars of the tradition are thus ‘‘banished’’ as ‘‘non-Menippean pleasures.’’ Apuleius and Sterne are dismissed in four pages for ‘‘having too much fun to be gloomy,’’ but also absent are Rabelais and Cervantes, and even the fantastic narratives of Lucian (whose Dialogues of the Dead are admitted). It is in its denial of pleasure that this definition of Menippean satire is most radical. Mr. Weinbrot has spent a long and learned career articulating a vision of formal verse satire in the eighteenth century. He finds in Horace, Juvenal, and Persius the exemplary pattern of blame and praise and the positive norm by which the satirist judges society and recommends change. Menippean satire...

Latin Arthurian Literature by Mildred Leake Day (review)

REVIEWS85 conversion or MaryMagdalene's departure from the Holy Land. Elsewhere flashbacks serve to fill in details about Sophie's and, perfunctorily, Langdon's childhoods. But, when the pivotal scene in which a younget (uncharacteristically shocked) Sophie witnessed an ominous ritual involving het 'grandfather' is shown in flashback for only a couple ofseconds, there is nothing to indicate that what shocks het is anything more than a standard sex scene with observers. Mark Twain once described Wagner's music as 'better than it sounds.' I wish I could suggest that The Da Vinci Code is better than it seems, if only because it eliminates some ofthe excesses and nonsense ofthe novel. But it is in fact plodding and sometimes incoherent. The novel, deeply flawed as it is, at least kept millions of people turning pages and anticipating the next twist or the next puzzle. Sadly, the film, with a capable cast, an experienced director, appealing scenery, and many millions of dollars, is unable to make us (as well as the characters) care much about the story as either historical conspiracy or contemporary thriller. NORRIS J. LACY Pennsylvania State University mildred leake day, LatinArthurian Literature. Arthurian Archives XI. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. Pp. via, 284. isbn: 1-84384-064-2. $85. Latin Arthurian Literature incorporates editions, with translations, of the three ptose tomances, De ortu Waluuanii nepotis Arturi (The Rise ofGawain, Nephew of Arthur), HistoriaMeriadoci Regis Cambriae (The Story ofMeriadoc, KingofCambria) Narratio de Arthure rege Britanniae et rege Gorgalon lycanthropo (The Tale ofKing Arthur andKing Gorgalon the Werewolf), and the verse satire 'Epistola Arturi Regis ad Henricum regem Anglorum' ('The Letter from King Arthur to Henry, King of England'). The introduction gives a full account of the textual situation of each, with subheadings on DateandAuthorship, Sources andAnalogues, Influences (on latet works), Artistic Achievement, andManuscript(s). The Latin texts are edited by Day from the manuscripts and presented with facing-page English translations. The fitst two nareatives in this book, De ortu Waluuani and Historia Meridoci— which derive from the same manuscript (Cotton Faustina B vi) and which were previously edited by J.D. Bruce in 1913—are substantially the editions published separately by Day in 1984 and 1988, respectively, but with newly expanded and updated introductions. With tegatd to both texts Day strengthens the case for rwelfth-century authorship by Robert de Torigni. De Ortu Waluuanii may be the best known of the four texts presented here. (Day's translation is also found in the anthology The Romance ofArthur, ed. James J. Wilhelm, 1994). It tells of Gawain's orphaning, obscure infancy, exile to the continent, and illustrious debut in the Papal court of Rome, and famously contains the phantasmagoric recipe for Greek Fire. Gawain's unhorsing ofArthur at the tale's conclusion—with the lame excuses Arthut makes to Guenivere for the state of his armor—is one ofthe finest comic episodes inArthurian literature. In her introduction, Day demonstrates De Ortu s analogues with Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight, both 86ARTHURIANA textually and as a sharet offolk motifs, also pointing out its influence on Diu Krone and on Book I ofSpenser's Faerie Queene. Set in the days when 'the Goddess Fortuna controlled human affairs' the Historia Meriadoci is the story of the Welsh prince who escapes assassination by a murderous uncle, travels to the Continent as a metcenaty knight, participates in the Merovingian domination ofGaul, and marries the emperor's daughter. Finally, the hero encounters the Goddess Fortuna hetself in her otherworldly stronghold. Two of these plot elements are grounded in history: the fourth-century migration ofsome Bretons to Brittany led by Conan Metiadoc, and the victory ofClovis over the Alemmani and the Burgundians (late fifth or early sixth centuty). This tale is also interesting for the peculiarity ofits engagement with the Dame Fortune motif. In het Introduction, Day charts this tale's influence on the poet of TheAwntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, as well as its probable influence on Malory's 'Tale ofSir Gareth.' Malory, she suggests, was familiar with and likely drew directly from the Latin text ofHistoria Meriadoci. Narrano deArthure rege Britanniae et rege Gorgalon lycanthropo is an installment in the 'what do...

Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (review)

Reviewed by Erin Mackie University of Canterbury Tita Chico. Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2005. 302pp. CAN$80.25. ISBN 0-83875-605-0. Designing Women offers a lively and sophisticated account of one of the most visible and provocative places in eighteenth-century English culture, the lady's dressing room. More than simply an exposition of the dressing room's broad significance in a single historical moment, Tita Chico's study shows how the meaning and functions of the dressing room change through history. Her study provides, then, not only a window on a rich set of epistemological and aesthetic preoccupations but also a window from which we can watch the unfolding of modern notions of femininity. Tracing its emergence in seventeenth-century satire through to its refigurations in mid- and late eighteenth-century domestic novels, Chico argues that the dressing-room trope "reformulates the question of female sexuality and desire into an implicit celebration of sexual reproduction" (160). Whereas the dressing room first appears as a site for satirists to query female agency, self-sufficiency, and the feminine aesthetic of cosmetic self-fashioning, it comes, through the texts of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and others, to take on a function less productive of masculine disapproval and more productive of legitimate feminine forms of virtue, knowledge, and authority. Chico's choice of the dressing room for a book-length study proves not in the least whimsical. Eighteenth-century literature frequently takes us into these personal spaces where women dressed, entertained, and corresponded. Sometimes, as in Swift's satires, these forays into feminine recesses are voyeuristic and distasteful. Here, the dressing room is a kind of anti-cosmos where women have deposited, crumpled and decaying, all the filthy detritus of their dubious self-fashioning. We cannot wait to get out. In other texts, such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, we spend most of our time in the dressing room, where, while we might share the heroine's anxiety and travails, we are never disgusted by this, her most intimate environment. A literary commonplace, the dressing room is specific to eighteenth-century England; its rhetorical prominence is confined to this time and place; in it Chico finds revealed a wealth of literary and cultural information about the period. And, as Chico shows, with its implication in matters of gender, sexuality, epistemology, and aesthetics, the dressing room abundantly repays attention given it from the perspective of contemporary critical concerns. Finally, what Designing Women most powerfully articulates, for me at least, is that it was precisely because the dressing room bore the weight of the concerns Chico explores here that it was so ubiquitous in eighteenth-century literature. If we have not already asked "Why the dressing room?" we should; Tita Chico has a substantial and satisfying reply. Taking as its focal point a specific cultural site, Designing Women approaches [End Page 225] this through a variety of textual genres and modes: verse satire, conduct books, and prose fiction. However, Chico does not handle her sources in a purely instrumentalist fashion, but shows how the dressing rooms in these texts are products specific to the rhetoric and conventions of the formal conventions of each. Thus, Designing Women contains much for students and scholars interested in satire and in the novel. In chapter 6, for example, Chico conducts a detailed, compelling reading of Clarissa by looking at the competition between satiric discourse, with its accusatory, sceptical, and misogynist figuration of the dressing room, and Richardson's novelistic discourse that figures the dressing room as an "architectural analogue for the production of virtue, epistolarity, and interiority" (159). Analysing Belford's report of his visit to Mrs Sinclair's dressing room late in the novel, Chico argues that his depiction of corrupt, secret feminine places "is designed to expunge any hint of impropriety from Clarissa and her virtuous narrative by associating...

Satiirikon lääkärikirja

The satirist's medical book: Disease imagery and moral criticism in Latin satire Satirists have often applied medical and bodily imagery in their art of moral castigation. The tradition of Latin satire is filled with images where the satirist acts like a medical doctor to reveal the patient's real, corrupted and diseased nature. Physical and moral sicknesses are often paralleled in Latin satire; physical illnesses are represented as symptoms of a moral failure and indices of the sick human condition. This article examines how medical terms were important in constructing moral criticism and how physical symptoms conveyed moral values in the genre. It focuses on two specific pathological symptoms (hidden wounds and paleness) and two sensory defects (deafness and blindness). Hidden wounds and pallor are metaphors of latent diseases and the sick soul, whereas blindness and deafness are more ambivalent. The emphasis of the discussion is on Roman verse satire (i.e, Horace, Persius and Juvenal), which established an imagery that was then adopted and further developed by later Latin satirists. The article concludes with a short account of two parodic disease eulogies from the seventeenth century, Marten Schoock's In Praise of Deafness (Surditatis encoruiurn) and Jakob Guther's Teiresias, or, In Praise of Blindness (Tiresias seu caecitatis encomium).

A New Eighteenth-Century Juvenal Translator: William Popple's Satires VI and X

William Popple (1700/1-1764), a descendant of Andrew Marvell's sister, was like his grandfather and namesake a goverment official of the higher echelons and an occasional writer and translator.1 He first published verse in 1726. Encouraged by Aaron Hill, he wrote two Cibberesque comedies which were performed on the London stage in the mid-1 730s. His career as a civil servant had begun in 1723, and in 1737 he transferred to the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1745 he became Governor of the Bermudas, remaining there until shortly before his death, apart from an extended visit to England in 1751-4. He published a translation of Horace's ArsPoetica in 1753, and a verse satire called The Age ofDulness in 1757. The former appeared under his own name while the latter was improbably ascribed to 'a natural son of the late Mr Pope'. On his death Popple left behind him a number of unpublished works. They include further verse satires, a miniature epic on the history of the Jews, and a stage adaptation of Petronius' Ephesian Matron. The last is in the British Library, but a handsome folio preserved in the Bodleian Library contains the rest. MS Douce 201 is a leather-bound presentation volume in a uniform professional hand, a collection of Popple's poetical works transcribed at some unspecified date. Several of the items are explicitly attributed to him in ornamental title pages to individual works, and at one point, on the title page of The Age ofDulness, the date 1756 appears, forming a terminus a quo for the