This chapter offers a detailed literary analysis of Theodore Prodromos’ Katomyomachia, highlighting its theatrical aspects, its clever use of textual and structural parody, its function as a school text, and its position within Byzantine beast literature, with a particular emphasis on the ‘Aesopic’ as a literary mode.

This chapter explores how Swift used hoax and parody in his satirical writings and pamphlets. An opening section looks at the five short pamphlets that constituted the 1708–9 Bickerstaff hoax, in which Swift predicted and then falsely confirmed the death of the Whig astrologer John Partridge. The second section shifts the focus on the Drapier’s Letters, where Swift similarly created a mock-author, albeit to very different ends. The chapter argues that such vividly realised personae are characteristic of Swift’s writing and sometimes result in works that are neither straightforward hoax nor parody.

Thomas Mann’s literary obsession with Nietzsche’ philosophy was lifelong, continuously evolving, and constantly subversive. His early short stories were preoccupied with Nietzsche’s Wagner reception and cultural critique of decadence; the middle-period novella, “Death in Venice” engaged with the mythical pair of the Dionysian and Apollonian; the novel Doktor Faustus, his self-proclaimed “Nietzsche book,” combined Nietzsche’s biography, aesthetics, and “the problem of the German.” In each phase, Mann’s reception was never simply dutiful, but rather mischievously pitted one Nietzschean position against another, deriving dramatic force from the often contradictory capaciousness of his thought. This chapter focuses on a work not always considered as part of Mann’s Nietzsche reception: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story later expanded to become Mann’s last novel. The text playfully juxtaposes Nietzsche’s “problem of the actor” and his ideal of self-fashioning, what Alexander Nehamas describes as Nietzsche’s “life as literature.” It explores issues of style, taste, parody, “gay science,” and the concerns attendant upon the translation of Nietzsche’s literary philosophy back into literature proper. It shows how the parody and mockery of Nietzschean ideals cannot help but fall in with the models they turn on, and the implications for our understanding of Nietzsche’s own writing.

This chapter introduces the subjects which will be discussed over the course of the book. The question of personal ontology – “what are we?” – is distinguished from the more commonly discussed question of personal identity over time – “under what conditions is someone at one time identical with something at some other time?” This chapter introduces the main thesis which will animate much of the book, namely that we are unable to choose between substance dualism and the thesis that we are composite physical objects, as the arguments on each side of the issue can be parodied. This chapter also introduces the concept of composition, as well as the thesis of composition as identity, and argues that composition as identity should be rejected. The chapter ends with brief summaries of the remaining chapters.

In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.

Films offer many interesting examples of irony in action. This chapter highlights the extent to which filmmakers create scenes that convey a range of both situational and verbal ironies. Films can express many types of irony (e.g., Charlie Chaplin films sometimes alerts viewers to ironic situations that the film character, Chaplin, is himself unaware of). Several of MacDowell’s arguments explicitly stand in contrast to Greg Currie’s claims that irony in film is rather limited. This chapter goes into many detailed examples of possible irony in films, including various cases of parody and dramatic irony, which greatly extend our understanding of the complexities of irony in both film and ordinary life. He later focuses on the larger, unresolved, question of whether films “contain” irony (i.e., as a property of films) or create conditions for viewers to infer their own ironic interpretations and experience particular emotional reactions (i.e., irony is an “effect” from films but not actually a property of films). MacDowell concludes that films offer viewers “invitations” to recognize an intended irony as being part of an artwork, even if that may not happen to all audiences.

This chapter focuses on The Magic Flute’s links to theatrical aesthetics of the Vienna court theater as well as debates surrounding the late eighteenth-century calls for the establishment of a German national theater tradition. This exploration suggests that Mozart’s unique experiences with the world of late eighteenth-century German theater traditions shaped The Magic Flute’s libretto significantly. Mozart’s contributions to Schikaneder’s libretto in fact enhance the work’s status as both a culmination of decades-long debates about German national theater and a harbinger of a future course for German national opera.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

When, on 28 October 1726, the Travels of a certain Lemuel Gulliver came out, its author couldn’t have made a better choice to attract a large audience when he gave his most famous satire the framework of a travel account, one of the most popular genres of the time. Swift was an avid reader of travel books himself, and from his reading he was able to endow Gulliver with the characteristics of a life-like traveller and enrich his account with numerous topical elements the reader would recognize as typical of the genre. Whether all these parallels and similarities were actually sources in the sense that Swift’s imagination fed on them is not really important. What matters is the fact that the reader met with authentic elements she was accustomed to when she expected to read a travel book. Swift employed this strategy of authentification in the Travels in order to increase the impact of the satiric shock of his attack on the political and human corruptions of his time. They were also a clever sham, a wild goose chase with deceptive potential, playing on the gullibility of the readers, who had no way of verifying Gulliver’s account unless they set sail themselves.

This chapter deals with the idiosyncratic works of two key authors from the Mad magazine generation: Harvey Kurtzman and Jules Feiffer. It addresses more specifically the distinctive satirical styles of both authors, who criticized and reconfigured, from a leftist and Jewish immigrant background, the standard signifiers of American mainstream culture. Although both authors contributed equally to the tradition of American cartooning, their work in the graphic novel field is highly divergent. Kurtzman started at EC in the war comics subgenre, but rapidly turned to humor magazines, before introducing an important stand-alone comics paperback with original material, Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, whose incongruous humor relied on clever, repetitive panel layouts. Like Kurtzman, Feiffer is adept at transmedial appropriation, but his work, which started under Will Eisner’s tutelage, is less focused on citational humor and both more personal and more political. Instead, Feiffer developed singular forms of graphic narratives targeting conformism. The chapter offers close readings of Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Feiffer’s noir trilogy: Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script (all from the 2010s).

Considering genres from a meta-perspective, this chapter elaborates on the mechanisms of comics genres, their specific codes, and their differences and similarities with genres in other media. It shows how genres are a practical tool for categorizing fiction and even more useful in highlighting the economic and cultural underpinnings of publishing contexts and media. As already suggested in Chapter 2, comics genres are particularly useful for understanding the relationships between comics and other media since they help delineate the parameters of the medium-specificity, or mediageny, of comics.

The chapter turns to the hybrid genre of the superhero and uses Fantastic Four as an example to examine the way genres evolve and are redefined by their users over time. It also elaborates on the long history of comics producing meaning for their readers by openly performing genres in addition to adhering to them. In showing how genre has become a less defining entity in contemporary comics production since it is often replaced by transmedial franchises or trademark styles and stories attached to successful authors and artists, the chapter also delineates the limits of generic analysis. For this, it turns to Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics and the Mignolaverse in general.

This essay concentrates on the practice and significance of parodying Shakespearean speeches during wartime, which reached a height during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. At a particularly pivotal moment – the renewal of war in 1803 – a spate of parodies of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy appeared in print, most of which adapted the speech for Napoleon, who debates the merits of invading Britain. This essay examines these overlooked parodies, paying particular attention to George Woodward’s ‘Buonaparte’s Soliloquy at Calais’ published by Rudolph Ackermann and circulated widely, including in the Weimer-based journal London und Paris. While these confident parodies express unambiguous support for Britain’s war effort and condemn Napoleon, they do not testify to united public opinion about the necessity of war or to untrammelled optimism about its outcome. This essay establishes their wider significance: they draw attention to a politically and culturally astute readership that was not limited by national or conflict lines, and they reveal the fractures beneath confident wartime propaganda. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy becomes a malleable rhetorical template for carrying out topical wartime debate, facilitating political discourse that could draw attention to the divisive debates underlining this period of conflict.

This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

This chapter demonstrates the seriousness and the versatility of the romance genre in the hands of two important late medieval English writers. Examples from the writings of fourteenth-century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, and fifteenth-century translator and editor, Thomas Malory, reveal romance to be a fictionalizing genre capable of probing serious matters of broad political, social, ethical, or aesthetic concern. The range and versatility of the genre, moreover, offered these writers crucial opportunities for creative and editorial experimentation.

Surrealist collage, favouring immediacy over sustained diegetic developments, would seem to contradict the possibility of coherent or cohesive narratives. Yet the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, which replaces in collage the (con)sequential links of conventional narratives, tantalizes the viewer-reader into searching for new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories or imagining potential scenarios. The chapter explores various key examples of surrealist collage narrative in both the verbal and visual fields: the micro-narratives suggested in André Breton’s early collage poems; Benjamin Péret’s collage poems made up of newspaper fragments; Giorgio de Chirico’s or René Magritte’s painted collages of enigmatic encounters; or Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský’s erotic scenarios. Focusing in particular on the parodic rewriting of the codes of melodrama in Max Ernst’s collage-novels, the chapter examines how fragments of popular nineteenth-century illustrated novels are recycled into new narratives. Finally, the study proposes a critique of psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that erase local disruptions in favour of a global coherence.

This chapter focuses on Roberto Bolaño poetical imagination; not only his poetry, but the way he uses poetry and the poet, as a literary figure, to stage an ironic and parodic representation of literature in the context of ongoing globalization. My main contention is that the exilic condition of Bolaño’s life and works defines his relationship to Latin American literature at large; thus, far from repeating conventional investments in literature’s potential to express Latin American singularity and to, somehow, supplement the historical process as a process leading to final liberation, what predominates in his works, and particularly in his decisive novel The Savage Detectives, is a skeptical understanding of the final disarticulation between literature and history. His characters, in other words, far from the mythical investment of Latin American romantic and revolutionary-like characters of the past, are defined by a nomadic and uncertain way of living detached from the age of commitment and political programs.

Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

Thomas analyses an American YouTube video titled ’Bed Intruder’, reporting on an attempted rape, and some of its adaptations by means of a Text World Theory approach.

Chapter 2 turns to examine early modern song culture at Wilton House. The work of Herbert’s aristocratic cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), provides a focal point for ideas about the collaborative enterprise of poets and musicians in the early seventeenth century. Pembroke was a patron of poets and musicians, and much of his verse survived in songbooks and musical settings by some of the leading composers of his day. In Pembroke’s collected Poems (London, 1660) we have a volume in which the voices of poets and musicians – those who compose and sing and preserve these poems – meet and combine and compete with one another. Noting George Herbert’s involvement in this literary and musical coterie, the chapter examines the implications of Pembroke’s patronage on Herbert’s verse, and demonstrates how Herbert’s verse critiques and transforms the worldly dynamics of patronage operating within the Wilton coterie.

This chapter sets out to establish what Molière’s prefaces and meta-theatrical plays tell us about audience laughter. In these texts, Molière sets up the notion of an ideal public, primarily by means of spectator characters who act as models or counter-models in terms of reception. His laughing characters allow us to understand the link between Molière and the laughter of a public that saw itself in them. In this way, Molière echoes wider contemporary discourse on comedy at the same time as contributing to its development. He offers reflections on parody, on the connection between audience laughter and poetics, on the relationship of the social aspects of audience laughter to moral decency and on laughter as an indication of a comic author’s merit. His spectator characters reflect a contemporary discourse that saw laughter as an entirely legitimate reaction to the performance of comedies, and Molière is thereby situated at the heart of the critical re-evaluation of laughter that occurred between 1660 and 1670, of which he was at once a beneficiary and one of the driving forces.