BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roman satura is discussed most recently and completely
in Satire, Critical Essays on Roman Literature, ed. J. P.
Sullivan (Bloomington, Ind., 1963). The nature of formal
verse satire is detailed by M. C. Randolph, “The Structural
Design of Formal Verse Satire,” Philosophical Quarterly, 21
(1942), 368-84. See also M. C. Randolph, “Celtic Smiths
and Satirists: Partners in Sorcery,” English Literary History,
8 (1941), 127-59, for the relation of magic to the violent
metaphors used by the satirist to describe his art. Primitive
satire and its development into art are the subject of R. C.
Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton,
1960), the single most important book on the subject of
satire, and one to which this article is heavily indebted.
The gradual shift of emphasis from the satirist to the
object of attack has been traced in great detail in two recent
books, which provide the most useful and complete history
of Western literary satire available: Ronald Paulson, The
Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, 1967); and idem, Satire and
the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven,
1967). The most useful single work on the nature of third-
person narrative satire is Ricardo Quintana, “Situation as
Satirical Method,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 17
(1947-48), 130-36.
The history and development of satyr-satire is followed
in A. B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse, Satire of the English
Renaissance (New Haven, 1959). The Pope
persona and the
general question of satiric
personae are treated in Maynard
Mack, “The Muse of Satire,”
Yale Review, 41 (1951-52),
80-92; and Swift's mastery of this device is helpfully dis-
cussed in W. B. Ewald, Jr.,
The Masks of Jonathan Swift
(Cambridge, Mass., 1954); and in Martin Price,
Swift's
Rhetorical Art (New Haven, 1953).
The typical images and symbols of satire were first worked
out by Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton,
1957). Frye's ideas are carried forward and focused helpfully
by Philip Pinkus, “St. George and the Dragon,” Queen's
Quarterly, 70 (1963-64), 30-49, where the author argues that
satire is not so much an attack on evil as a sad and con-
temptuous portrayal of its triumph. The characteristic
structure and plot of satire are discussed in A. B. Kernan,
“A Theory of Satire,” The Cankered Muse (New Haven,
1959); and idem, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965).
The latter book attempts to define the differences between
satire and the genres with which it is frequently confused,
tragedy and comedy.
Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr., Swift and the Satirist's Art
(Chicago, 1963), argues the case against the possibility of
any general description of a genre so varied in its instances,
and insists that the best definition can be no more than,
“Satire consists of an attack by means of a manifest fiction
upon discernible historical particulars” (p. 31).
For a collection of modern criticism see Ronald Paulson,
ed., Modern Essays in Criticism, Satire (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1971).
ALVIN B. KERNAN
[See also
Comic; Evil;
Irony; Literature; Motif;
Style;
Tragic.]
