Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne

Michael A. Seidel

ISBN 10: 0691064083 / ISBN 13: 9780691064086

Published by Princeton University Press, 1979

About this Item

1st Edition (1979) GOOD+ in a good dust jacket. Has a few underlines on a few pages as well as some minor marginalia. Mostly clean. xiv, 283 pages ; 23 cm. . . . . . . Seidels study of how satire works through narratives of dispensation, succession, and inheritance. Seidel argues that satiric potential is latent in almost any story about transmitting and preserving form - estates, lineages, titles, texts, or cultural authority - and that major narrative satires convert the promise of inheritance into a conspiracy of degeneration. Rather than treating the satirist as a moral spokesman, he presents the satirist as implicated in the very decline he chronicles. After theoretical chapters on the *satiric dispensation* and inheritance as narrative mode, the book reads Rabelais and Cervantes as revisionary ancestors, then tracks the pattern through Butler?s Hudibras, Marvell and Dryden, Swifts A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver?s Travels, Pope?s Rape of the Lock and Dunciad, and Sterne?s Tristram Shandy.

Seller Inventory # 2609080003

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691064083
• ISBN 13: 9780691064086
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Weight: 19 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Misc.

About this title

Synopsis

Arguing that satiric potential is latent in virtually all dispensation, succession, and inheritance narratives, Michael Seidel suggests a new and comprehensive understanding of satire's place in the more general context of narrative theory. The notion of inheritance shares with traditional narrative action the need to transmit and preserve form.

Originally published in 1979.

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