Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, d'Urfey, and Sterne

Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, d'Urfey, and Sterne

Walden, Daniel
Sherbert, Garry H.

Hardcover

Series: Comparative Cultures and Literatures, Book 8

PhilosophyHumorLiterary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0820424994
ISBN13: 9780820424996
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: Apr 1 1996
Pages: 226
Language: English
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.

Also from

Walden, Daniel

View All

Also in

Philosophy

View All