Critical Insights: Satire

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A CHOICE Top 75 Community College Resource for September 2020

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Critical Insights: Satire examines the ways satire has appeared as a significant approach to literature from many different times and cultures. This volume analyzes the ways in which satire has been used in literature to expose and criticize different cultures and societies. Satire is one of the oldest, most common, and most important literary genres. Famous works of satire have been written from classical times to the present day. This volume not only explores various particular works of satire, including the classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Gulliver’s Travels but also examines Satire as satirical works and roles that satire has played in human culture. 

This volume, like all others in the Critical Insights series, is divided into several sections. It begins with an introductory piece, “Toward a More Inclusive Theory of Satire,” by Julia Hans, which emphasizes the contributions of women to satire as a form of writing.

Following Hans’ piece come four essays designed to provide “critical contexts” for the volume as a whole:

• "Shakespeare and Early Modern Satire on Drunks and Drunkenness," Jonathan D. Wright
• "Ideas About Satire: An Overview," Robert C. Evans
• "Verses Satirizing War: Satirical War Poetry from Marvell to Sassoon," Nicolas Tredell
• "Satire on the Drunken Body in Shakespeare, His Predecessors, and Contemporaries," Jonathan D. Wright

The volume’s next—and largest—section, Critical Readings, offers a deliberately diverse collection of pieces that approach the theme of greed from many different perspectives:

• The Satirist as Troll in Early Modern England, Matthew Steggle
• Jonson and Satire: A Survey of Recent Scholarship, Joyce Ahn
• The Alchemists in The Alchemist, Sara van den Berg
• Adapting the (Un)familiar: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the 1996 Miniseries, Breanne Oryschak
• Gulliver’s Travels: The 1996 Televised Mini-Series (A Survey of Reviews), Anna Orlofsky
• The Artistry of Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, James Hirsh
• Benjamin Franklin, An American Satirist, Kevin J. Hayes
• Epic Satire? Byron’s Don Juan, Nicolas Tredell
• African American Satire: Previously Uncollected Newspaper Columns, George S. Schuyler
• Deconstructing Icons of Beauty: Dorothy Parkers and the Satiric Grotesque, Julia Hans
• The 1984 Film of Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four: A Survey of Commentary, Robert C. Evans
• Philip Larkin’s Satiric Humor, Robert C. Evans

This volume concludes with a section devoted to resources, particularly a lengthy secondary bibliography and list of further readings, a comprehensive index, as well as information about the editor and contributors.

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world’s most-studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia’s most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: Satire provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable literary resource for all.

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