Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D'Urfey, and Sterne (Comparative Cultures and Literatures) - Hardcover

Sherbert, Garry H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820424994 ISBN 13: 9780820424996

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

The Author: Garry Sherbert received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, where he recently completed a SSHRCC postdoctoral fellowship. He has published on literary theory and Menippean satire, and his research interests now include nineteenth-century Menippean authors, Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille. He currently teaches English at the University of Regina and at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Regina, Saskatchewan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0820424994
• ISBN 13: 9780820424996
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 226