In addition to the works I have listed here and in other bibliographies, a useful bibliography of satire is available online from Brian Connery.

        In Satire, A Reintroduction (see below) Dustin Griffin traces the movement of satiric theory from the classics to the early 1990s, and, as with other tasks in describing satire, I need not repeat here what Griffin has done already. But I ought briefly to set a boundary between my approach and others which have contributed positively and negatively to what I have to say. One such approach has been the categorical survey exemplified by Gilbert Highet's The Anatomy of Satire and, more reliably, by Matthew Hodgart's Satire. These, and similarly compendious studies by Leonard Feinberg and George Test, follow the basic pattern of establishing and defining classifications and then exemplifying each by reference to a range of appropriate satires. Usually, in such cases, the texts are not given enough attention to account for them as texts or to allow the texts to advance the theoretical argument; the argument usually operates at the level of definition and description rather than theory in a larger (or, as some would have it, smaller) sense. I have found more powerful the descriptions of satire in studies of individual authors whose work cannot be analyzed without attention to satire itself: Rudd on Horace, Branham on Lucian, Rosenheim on Swift, Timms on Kraus. Steven Weisenburger, in discussing the prevalence of satire in modern and postmodern American fiction, argues that satire is not only "generative," "a rationalist discourse launched against the exemplars of folly and vice" but also "degenerative," functioning "to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own." I find this approach a useful correction to traditional views of satire as conservative, but I would go a step further. Rather than seeing "degenerative" satire in opposition to "generative" satire, I see both as sides of the same coin, often inseparable when the attack on vice or folly remains silent about the corresponding virtue or undermines the very values by which it attacks. Several studies look at satire to find defining themes. Michael Seidel sees "satiric action" as expressing degeneration and disinheritance and applies that pattern to the reading of specific works. John Snyder looks at satire as a "semi-genre" that is the verbal expression of frustration at the lack of power, a frustration that expresses itself in irony and in attacks on those who unworthily claim power. His approach to satire is part of a general effort to explore the "the theory of genres as configurations of power," and that approach limits what he can say about satire itself. The thematic approach to satire yields rich insights but partial accounts.

        An alternative to the limitations of narrowly thematic approaches is the collection of essays that incorporate a variety of topics and critical positions. Four of these deserve particular notice. Ronald Paulson's 1971 collection comprises previously published essays (between 1912 and 1968), many from books that demand attention on their own. But the assembly of so many major critical essays on satire in a single volume gives it a critical authority that it has retained for the past thirty years. Its appearance marked the apogee of satire studies in the late 1950s and 1960s, represented in books by Kernan, Elliott, and Paulson himself. The collection on English Satire and the Satiric Tradition edited by Claude Rawson in 1984, in memory of Robert Elliott, who died in 1984, is not as insistently nationalistic nor as concerned with a coherent tradition as its title suggests. Its essays, prefaced by studies on Aristophanic satire and on popular flytings, cover a range of English satire from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, with what might be thought of as a postscript on Borges. Several terms of the title are pleasingly problematic. The collection's inability to remain within its national limits illustrates the degree to which satire is itself an international form, cross-fed from other languages and cultures (as it is from other genres). Many of the essays consider particular works and authors in larger contexts, and several trace classical influences in eighteenth-century works, but the closest the volume comes to articulating a tradition is in Rawson's descriptive introduction. The collection analyzes several works and authors not usually thought of as satiric (Marilyn Butler on Liber Amoris, Martin Price on Conrad, Barbara Everett on Sweeney Agonistes), and such inclusiveness is a reminder that the reasons for seeing a work as satiric are often more interesting than the effort to erect exclusive definitions.

        Two more recent collections purport to examine satire through the lense of postmodern theory. Of these, Theorizing Satire is by far the less theoretical, its essays focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the historical treatment of satiric works and subgenres. To test, perhaps unfairly, the prevalence of critical theory, I independently and rather randomly listed sixteen theorists from the past few generations and looked them up in the index. Of the sixteen, only six were mentioned in any of the ten essays of Theorizing Satire. Most were mentioned in passing; only one (Lacan) received any substantial discussion. In contrast, nearly all were mentioned repeatedly and substantively in Cutting Edges. The test is partly unfair because several of the essays in Theorizing Satire take interesting theoretical approaches, but its claim to "enact the often dizzying array of current critical approaches and concerns" (13) is unrealized. In its use of theory Cutting Edges comes a great deal closer to meeting the goals stated but unmet by Theorizing Satire. Although the range of its texts is limited to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, it is concerned with a number of issues characteristic of contemporary theory: a willingness to deal with obscure and neglected works, especially as revelatory of historical contexts; an interest in the relation of satire to gender (usually independent of the question of why women so seldom write it); a recognition of the figurative and physical body as vehicle and object of satire; an application of non-literary theory and method (anthropological, sociological, and psychological) to satiric literature. Although many of its essays are thoughtfully theoretical, they have a tendency, endemic to studies focused on single texts or limited groups of texts, to move in a downward direction, to use theory as a way of establishing categories, issues, and approaches, which are then exemplified by the subject texts, without returning to look at how theory has been modified, refined, or corrected by the textual encounter. As a result, theory is exemplified more often than it is advanced. Perhaps eclectic critics (such as myself) need to resist the tendency to separate theory from practice in order to apply theoretical approaches to texts. Or, to put it more positively, they need to see texts as creators as well as exemplars of theory, so as to understand not only the relationship between theory and text but the connections between the theory generated by texts and the theory that is independent of them. The boundary between theory and practice is one of those interrogated by satire.

        Three major studies of satire require particular attention. Chronologically the first of these, Alvin Kernan's discussion of satire in general and Renaissance satire in particular in The Cankered Muse can be said to mark a watershed in the criticism of satire. Kernan sees satire as inherently dramatic, though he does not develop the implications of that view thoroughly but uses it instead as a transition to his description of satire in terms of its scene, speaker, and plot.  "The scene is always crowded, disorderly, grotesque; the satirist, in those satires where he appears, is always indignant, dedicated to truth, pessimistic, and caught in a series of unpleasant contradictions incumbent on practicing his trade; the plot always takes the pattern of purpose followed by passion, but fails to develop beyond this point" (Kernan, p. 35).  The extent of Kernan's overstatement is manifest in the triple "always" that modifies his descriptions of the scene, satirist, and plot. His treatment of the satirist as a public creature embodying the qualities of satire itself properly prevents the naive identification of the satirist with the historical author that had been a characteristic of earlier biographical criticism. His satirist "always presents himself as a blunt, honest man with no nonsense about him," who is impelled by the corruption of the times to assert his simple moral truths (Kernan, p. 16). But even Horace, who admits to the simple moral training supplied by his father, also functions publicly as a member of the sophisticated Maecenas circle; the image hardly begins to apply to the complex speaker of Don Juan. The figure of the satirist is simply absent from some satires (for example, The Praise of Folly) or is disguised in others (A Tale of a Tub). More seriously, the residual moralism of Kernan's blunt satirist understates the elements of manipulation and play that other critics find significant in satire. But his treatment of the satirist as an image created by the nature of satire itself opens the way for those critics who find satire more playful than Kernan does.

        An alternative to morality and play, combining elements of both, is magic. The year after Kernan's book on Renaissance satire appeared, Robert C. Elliott's The Power of Satire argued that magic was the theoretical and historical basis of satire. Using examples from primitive cultures, especially Old Irish, Elliott associates the effect of satire on its victims with the power of the curse. This magic power, he argues, persisted, if only latently, in Roman satire, and it remains a residual element even in the modern period. But at some point, perhaps quite early in the process, the ritual power of satire to name and curse its victim becomes metaphorical; instead of visiting its target with boils, plagues, and death, it conjures up destructive public ridicule. Elliott applies this pattern to three misanthropic railleurs-Timon, as represented by Lucian and, at greater length, by Shakespeare, Molière's Alceste, and Swift's Gulliver-and to two particularly disagreeable modern satirists (Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell). I find Elliott's historical argument unconvincing. Not only are the gaps in the historical record wide and numerous, but for virtually every recurrence of satiric magic an alternative explanation is available. People resent being ridiculed, the fear that they might be is unsettling, and the poet who has the power to spread such ridicule might well be a fearsome force for perfectly natural reasons, without resorting to the persistence of magic for an explanation. The focus on magic tends to narrow the scope of satire to hostile personal attack, although, in his readings of satire, Elliott is aware that one of the "magic" elements of satire is its propensity to transform personal attack into general disturbance. But Elliott's view of satire is narrow in another way as well: great satire (Book IV of Pope's Dunciad is an example, even while the first three books seem to be counter-examples) may also be anti-magical, mocking those who claim that they can transform reality-precisely the rationalist stance adopted by Lucian in his attacks on Alexander and Peregrinus.

        Elliott's readings of particular satires are excellent. His remarks on the genre of satire are stimulating. His awareness of the speculative nature of his project makes him judicious and guarded in asserting it. His remarks on the transgressive nature of satire (pp. 257-75) can hardly be bettered. He has succeeded in creating the great mythology of satire. But there is a sense in which that mythology is unnecessary, for satire is magic. That magic does not lie in its anthropological roots or its psychological universality but in the active power of language itself, in the capacity of language not merely to say things but to do things. This magic involves not only a wide variety of figurative substitutions and transformations but in possibility that the uttering of a particular statement in a particular context itself creates a significance that is different from or additional to its verbal meaning. The explanation of the magic of satire, I think, needs to be linguistic and pragmatic rather than anthropological and historical.

        Dustin Griffin's Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994) does, in contrast to Kernan and perhaps Elliott, provide plenty of space for play, the subject of its third chapter. Griffin, unlike most previous writers on satire, combines formal verse satire and Menippean satire and approaches satire from a variety of formal and topic perspectives, rather than seeking a systematic approach that would provide a coherent but probably reductive account of such an amorphous form. He rejects the moralistic approach of the previous critical generation to concentrate instead on the capacity of satire to probe issues and raise questions without necessarily coming to conclusions. "I argue in each case that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than to provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers" (Griffin, pp. 4-5). Griffin provides strong readings of his satiric examples and is meticulous in seeing the relationship between historical theories of satire and satiric praxis (a relationship that I largely avoid in this study). Griffin's study is the best current introduction to satire as a genre-or at least to formal verse satire and Menippean satire. But Griffin eliminates consideration of narrative satire, he says, for reasons of space and does not look at dramatic satire at all. This narrowness of scope does not impede his generic account of mainline satire, but it does make his historical generalizations somewhat suspect. At two points in time, at least, satire ducks into plays or novels. In 1599, as Elliott points out, satire was rather ineffectively prohibited in England, and as a result satirists were less likely to write verse and prose satires but instead wrote satiric comedy for the stage. In the middle of the eighteenth century, as I argue below, the novel offered satirists structural and social possibilities that considerably expanded its scope. The history of satire cannot be written without some attention to these and other shifts, and in cutting himself off from novelistic and dramatic satire, Griffin weakens the validity of his historical explanations, though his general account of satire is strong. The present study might be thought of as a complement to Griffin's, broader in scope, less concentrated on the historical relationship between theory and praxis, more speculative in its own theoretical interests, more driven by linguistic considerations, and somewhat more systematic in its organization, although, like Griffin, I do not pretend to provide a full account of the genre. At best it represents eclectic and tentative theorizing about satire. What it has of theory is based on linguistics and, more specifically, on pragmatics, seeing satire as manipulating the possibilities of meaningful communication, perhaps to equate immoral behavior with meaningless language, perhaps to question the very possibilities of meaning.

        Fredric V. Bogel's account of the rhetoric of Augustan satire appeared too late to serve as the basis for my own thinking about satire. I certainly welcome his attacks on moralistic criticism of satire, on rigid definition of the exclusive roles of satirists, their readers, and the objects of their attack, and on an insistent use of binary distinctions as tool of analysis. But in a sense his own description of satire is based on precisely such a distinction. Using the work of René Girard and Mary Douglas, he concentrates on identity and difference to argue against the distance that what he calls traditional criticism has imposed between reader and object, reader and satirist, and satirist and object. Instead he sees the patterns of identity and difference as undermining the apparent exercise of these roles. By virtue of attacking a satiric object, the satirist loudly proclaims a distance from it, but the very fact of attack implies a degree of identity between the satirist and object, an identity that fosters the discomfort prompting the attack. Similar relations of identity and distance double the relations between readers and objects.

        Although I do not want to bring false comforts to either satirists or readers, I have three problems with this approach. The pattern of identity and distinction strikes me as so basic to the way in which people think that it does not seem to say much to say that it operates in the case of satire. The making of distinctions presupposes a degree of identity in any case, and to postulate a degree of anxiety in the satirist's identity with the satiric object is to make psychological what is only a logical necessity and to take the satirist's expression of outrage at face value. Bogel's readers and satirists remain abstract entities postulated by his theory, but real satirists behave in a variety of ways and, more tellingly, real readers do. Individual readers may behave in a variety of ways simultaneously. Even naive readers who insist on reading a text one way (the right way) are sometimes aware that many alternative readings are possible and that each alternative may depend on different combinations of identity and difference between the satirist and the satiric object. Finally, beyond the satiric object attacked emerges the real subject of the satire, much as the mountain looms beyond the opposite shore as Wordsworth rows across the water in the first book of The Prelude. It may be this real subject rather than either the satiric object or even the satirist that provides many readers with grounds for identification, but attack is ultimate rather than instrumental in Bogel's rhetoric.

Works Cited

Branham, H. Bracht. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Connery, Brian A. and Kirk Combe, eds. Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Douglas Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966; rpt, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

Elliott, Robert C. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.

Feinberg, Leonard. Introduction to Satire. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967.

---. The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1963.

Gill, James F., ed. Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Griffin, Dustin. Satire, A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.

Highet, Gilbert. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.

Hodgart, Matthew. Satire. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.

Kernan, Alvin P. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

Paulson, Ronald, ed. Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Rawson, Claude, ed. English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1984.

Rosenheim, Edward. Swift and the Satirist's Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Rudd, Niall. The Satires of Horace: A Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Seidel, Michael. Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1979

Snyder, John. Prospects of Power: Tragedy, Satire, the Essay, and the Theory of Genre. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991

Test, George A. Satire: Spirit and Art. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991.

Timms, Edward. Karl Krause Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.

Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

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