The literature of satire

"The Literature of Satire is a wide-ranging study of satire from the classics to the present in plays, novels, and the press, as well as in verse. In it Charles Knight analyses the rhetorical problems created by satire's complex relations to its community, and examines how it exploits the genres it borrows. He argues that satire derives from an awareness of the differences between appearance, ideas, and discourse. Knight provides illuminating readings of such satirists, familiar and unfamiliar, as Horace, Lucian, Jonson, Moliere, Swift, Pope, Byron, Flaubert, Ostrovsky, Kundera, and Rushdie. This broad-ranging examination sheds new light on the nature and functions of satire as a model of writing, as well as on theoretical approaches to it. It will be of interest to scholars interested in literary theory as well as those specifically interested in satire."--Jacket.