Author : Garry Sherbert
Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)
Book Synopsis Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit by : Garry Sherbert
Download or read book Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit written by Garry Sherbert and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the prominence given to it recently by Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye, Menippean satire remains a neglected and misunderstood genre. Focusing on the eighteenth-century writers John Dunton, Thomas D'Urfey, and Laurence Sterne, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit explores the excesses of these eccentric, transgressive writers who take their readers to the limits of language. As the outlaw of genre, Menippean satire exploits the improprieties supplied by a self-conscious use of wit, the principle of exuberance in eighteenth-century poetics. In fact, the exuberance of wit produces Menippean satire's central paradox that self-conscious writers lose their identity in the very pursuit of it. By tracing wit's exuberance through its abusive metaphors, or catachreses, to the abusive ideologies of class and gender, this genre-study provides a literary tradition for the postmodern deconstructive project, including the work of Jacques Derrida.