Persius, Satires (especially Satire 5). [Persius is mild, moral, and subtle; he is known for his
Stoicism and for the difficulty of his Latin style.]
Senaca, Apocolocyntosis. [Seneca's Menippean satire, whose title can be translated as "the pumpkinification of Claudius," concerns the unsuccessful efforts of the emperor Claudius to join the gods. (Seneca was tutor of Nero, who succeeded Claudius.)]
Petronius, Satyricon. [A fragmentary, novelistic satire, in imitation of the Odyssey and perhaps of early romances. It is a gritty story of the wandering quest of its central character to regain his list virility.]
Apuleius, The Golden Ass. [Magic transforms the hero into an ass, who gives us an ass's view of life. When he finally is retransformed, he becomes religious. Compares closely with the version of the story wrongly attributed to Lucian.]
Erasmus, The Praise of Folly. [Folly gives an elaborate but inconsistent speech in which she claims that she is worshipped by all-by the foolish, by scholars, kings, and Popes, and by truly religious Christians who renounce the follies of the world. A complicated work by the great Renaissance humanist.]
Thomas More, Utopia. [A possibly ironic traveler tells the story of his visit to a country (literally "nowhere") that is significantly different from the world we know. (More, another great Renaissance humanist, was a friend of Erasmus.)]
François Rabelais, Gargantua, Pantagruel, Tiers Livre, Quart Livre. [The first two books are stories of the giants Gargantua and his son Pantagruel; in the second two, which introduce the great comic character of Panurge, they and their friends seem to become more human in size. But the books throughout are gigantic in their satiric scope and their elaborate satiric wordplay.]
John Donne, Satires. [Donne's five numbered satires, the greatest of the English Renaissance, cast a caustic eye on London of the 1590s: on a foolish, foppish wit, on a selfish poet-turned-lawyer; on doubt and religion (a great and profound satire), on the superficially of court (reminiscent of Horace, Satires 1.9), and on the law.]
Ben Jonson, Volpone, The Alchemist. [Both plays have Aristophanic patterns. In Volpone a foxy old man pretends to be sick in order to gain money (and sex) from would-be heirs. In The Alchemist a trio of con-people fake alchemy and other transforming schemes to deceive a comic series of gulls in a richly satisfying (or disturbing) plot.]
Samuel Butler, Hudribras (Canto I). [Butler's knight Hudibras and his servant Ralpho imitate Quixote and Sancho in their puritanic quests. Butler developed a style of four-beat couplets that came to be known as Hudibrastic, and Canto I gives a sense of his comic style and satiric approach.]
Andrew Marvell, Last Instructions to a Painter. [Marvell's occasional poem on the disasters of 1667 seems like an ironic newspaper in rhyme: portraits of the great and ungreat, parliamentary debates, the seductive and destructive raid of the Dutch up the Thames to destroy the British fleet, and the effect of this on politics great and small. Marvell's painter must paint the scenes.]
Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters. [The first is Defoe's poem in defense of William III, who was attacked for being Dutch; in response, Defoe argues that there is no such thing as a "true-born Englishman." The second is a parody of high-church arguments suggesting that the best way to deal with dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants) would be to hang them. The tract, misread, led to Defoe's famous visit to the pillory.]
John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull. [A series of tracts that treats major figures of the War of Spanish Succession (and British debates about the war) as animals. An example of transforming topical figures into animals-comparable to Orwell's Animal Farm.]
Samuel Johnson, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. [Johnson's imitations of Juvenal's Satires 3 and 10 are unusually fine adaptations of the Roman past to the English (eighteenth-century) present. London is an effective but relatively early work; The Vanity of Human Wishes shows Johnson at his mature best.]
Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. [Smollett presents Roderick Random as a satire, one that is developed through the socially significant adventures of an outcast trying to regain his rightful place in society. In Humphry Clinker an ailing uncle takes his nephew and niece on a journey through most of England and Scotland, and the novel is rich in characters as well as satiric incidents, seen from the perspectives of both the old and the young. Both novels are fruitful sources for the relation of satire to the novel.]
Voltaire, Candide. [Voltaire's famous philosophical tale is directed at the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, but to expose the absurdity of that notion, it takes the hero and his friends on journeys that reveal that the world is not much good at all.]
Jane Collier, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. [Collier's satire is directed against domestic roles. It takes up a series of relationships that are defined in terms of relative power and provides instructions on how the powerful can make life miserable for the less powerful.]
Frances Burney, Evelina. [An attractive young woman, seeking to discover her real heritage, writes a series of letters recounting her entry into fashionable society and the disasters and embarrassments she seems to face at every turn.]
William Blake, An Island in the Moon, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [On an island resembling England, intellectual men and socialite women chat and poeticize nonsensically and comically. "Marriage" is Blake's great Menippean prophecy on the nature of reality, the falsity of traditional religion, the importance of opposition, and the centrality of creative energy.]
Denis Diderot, Jacques le fatiliste [A talkative veteran who learned from his captain that survival is just a matter of chance tries to survive with his conventional and somewhat dim-witted master. The two entertain each other by telling stories, and they meet a number of other characters who have significant stories to tell, in a great and influential anti-novel.]
Robert Burns, "Holy Willie's Prayer," "Address to the Unco Guid," "The Holy Fair," "Love and Liberty" ["The Jolly Beggars"], "The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer," "The Twa Dogs," "Address to the Deil," "Address of Beelzebub," "A Dream," "Tam O'Shanter," "When Princes and Prelates," "Is There for Honest Poverty" [In a variety of lively poems, mostly written in Scots dialect, Burns takes after religious hypocrisy, political self-serving, and social injustice, and he satirizes from an unusual peasant perspective.]
Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey. [In Peacock's short comic novels, more-or-less identifiable romantic figures (certainly including Shelley and Coleridge) gather for extended and funny dialogues. The satire of Nightmare Abbey is more directed and specific.]
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Peter Bell the Third," "The Mask of Anarchy." [In "Peter Bell" Shelley identifies Wordsworth with one of his stupider characters, sends him to Hell (London), where, like Wordsworth, he becomes a success by becoming a Tory, and condemns him to eternal dullness. "Mask" is Shelley's powerful response to the massacre of peaceful protesters near Manchester; the poem is revolutionary in its power, and its poetic force parallels the force of the people.]
Charles Dickens, Hard Times. [Dickens's novels certainly have satiric characteristics, but Hard Times is one of the shortest, as well as one of the most directed in its satire-an attack on Victorian industrial society and on the utilitarian philosophy that guided it.]
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now. [One of the most pessimistic of Trollope's novels (and one of the longest). It has at its center the portrait of a powerful scoundrel who almost succeeds in fooling society at large, but most of the other characters are flawed or worse.]
Samuel Butler, Erewhon. [With great difficulty and good fortune ("as luck would have it, Providence was on my side"), a Gulliveresque explorer finds himself in a strange land that serves as an inversion of modern England. ("Erewhon" is, of course, "no where" backwards.) The ill and the poor are sent to jail, the criminals to a hospital. Organized religion is replaced by "Musical Banks" where the currency has no value, but everyone believes it. People study at the "Colleges of Unreason."]
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. [The hero-narrator falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes to find himself in Boston of the year 2000. He seeks to explain to his hosts the social and economic turmoils of the nineteenth century; they, in turn, explain the socialist accomplishments of the twentieth. Unfortunately, he wakes to the squalor of 1887.]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. [A parody of a boy's adventure story finds the hero and his (male) friends isolated in a utopian society made up entirely of women. The sexist attitudes of the boys, especially their male sense of superiority, are frustrated by the intelligence of the women and the efficiency of their social organization.]
Aldous Huxley, Point-Counterpoint, Brave New World [Huxley's famous novels of the 1920s are concerned with how the individual is to live with any integrity in a world that is essentially disgusting. In Point-Counterpoint, characters representing actual literary figures and standing for various ideas discuss and live the issues. In Brave New World a "Savage" from the past confronts a bloodless and totalitarian scientific and industrial world.]
Wyndham Lewis, Apes of God [A long, witty, elaborate, difficult, and particularly vicious treatment of vacuous intellectual and artistic life in Bloomsbury of the 1920s. A major satiric novel, alternatively hilarious and irritating. The characters are two-dimensional but not wooden, and many have real-life equivalents. Part 9 contains a particularly important discussion of satire, fiction, and reality.]
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm. [After the death of her parents, an attractive and intelligent young woman lives on the decaying farm of her relatives and finds herself in a stereotypical agricultural novel filled with lust, passion, violence, family secrets, animals (human and otherwise) and considerable dirt. Naturally, she tries to sort things out, in this lively and stylish parody.]
Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust. [Hollywood is satirized in terms of its effect on its losers, on those who come to California in order to die. They are observed by a young writer who achieves, at the end, an apocalyptic vision, in West's short but somber narrative.]
George Orwell, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four. [The animals revolt against their human masters only to fall victim to the dictatorship of the pigs. How and why this happens is the substance of Orwell's satiric allegory-read at the time as an attack on Nazism and Bolshevism, but open to other readings as well. Nineteen Eighty-Four presents the world of what seemed, in 1948, the rather distant future, in which big power blocks keep the world continually at war and in which the distortion of language serves the interests of power.]
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire. [A respected poet writes an autobiographical poem that turns out to be his last. The task of editing it falls to his crazy neighbor, who uses his notes and commentary more to tell his own story than to illuminate the poem. But what is his story? Is he the exiled king of a distant land, a deranged subject of that king, a mad Russian professor? The story offers a series of comic puzzles and shifting meanings.]
Muriel Spark, The Abbess of Crewe, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [Spark's novels are generally satiric, and in these her satire seems most dominant. The first treats the Watergate affair as the election of a charming but conniving abbess in a convent; in the second a diabolic figure finds it easy to raise Cain in a London suburb; in the third, an interconnected group of old people independently get phone calls telling them to remember they must die; in the last a beloved and eccentric teacher goes too far in controlling her flock.]
Joseph Heller, Catch-22. [The screw-ups of the military in World War II-sometimes comic, sometimes grotesquely tragic-typify the victimization of ordinary people by the American system. Heller's satire is rich in its great comic characters and its disturbing incidents.]
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. [At the center is the destruction of Dresden by allied bombing in World War II, an event of which Vonnegut himself was an unwilling witness. Another witness is Billy Pilgrim, whose abduction by aliens gives him the power to move backward and forward through his life (as the novel does). The mixture of fantasy and stark realism is highly pessimistic. "So it goes."]
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo. [If you have always wondered what the relationship is between voodoo and postmodernism, Reed's wild, comic, and sinister attack on (white) western civilization, set mainly in Harlem of the 1920s, will make it clear. Or maybe it won't.]
Robert Coover, The Public Burning. [A massive indictment of American society and politics, set in the McCarthy era, concentrates on the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenburg for spying. Coover borrows the technique of John Dos Passos in juxtaposing striking (and hardly impartial) accounts of the news with a first-person narrative, in which the narrator is none other than Richard M. Nixon.]
Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. [An ungainly suburban housewife devises an elaborate, ingenious, and cruel revenge on her husband and his mistress in a novel that combines the Jacobian revenge plot with the story of Frankenstein's monster. More a dark comedy than a satire, perhaps, but the novel engages a number of satiric issues and techniques.]
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. [The life of Mohammad and other religious incidents are dreamed by a vulgar, quasi-angelic Indian film star, who has survived the wreckage of a hijacked plane. His fellow survivor is an quasi-diabolic expatriate ex-Moslem who is (temporarily) turned into a goat. Rushdie's complex and controversial novel explores the problems of religious belief, sexuality, the racism of British society, and the illusions of modern culture.]
Don DeLillo, White Noise. [A specialist in Hitler studies who teaches at a small-town college reveals the difficulties of dealing with family life (and death), especially if you unthinkingly accept the values of liberal America. DeLillo's satiric novel has become a controversial classic of academic fiction.]
William Gaddis, Agape Agape. [Gaddis's J R is arguably the most powerful American satire since 1950, but also the longest and the most dense. But some of its major themes and features are apparent in his short final work, in which a writer on the verge of death (as Gaddis was when he wrote it) struggles to set down his account of the destruction of art by technology, a destruction that parallels his deteriorating physical (and perhaps mental) condition.]