This remarkable study of the constructive and ultimately canon-forming relationship between satiric and Romantic modes of writing from 1760 to 1832 provides us with a new understanding of the historical development of Romanticism as a literary movement. Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other as the un-Romantic mode. This book argues instead that the two modes mutually defined each other and were subtly interwoven during the Romantic period. By rearranging reputations, changing aesthetic assumptions, and re-distributing cultural capital, the interaction of satiric and Romantic modes helped make possible the Victorian and modern construction of 'English Romanticism'.

"Traces the Gothic impulses in proto-Romantic and Romantic British, American and European culture, 1740-1830"--Quatrième de couverture.

Romanticism was not only heterogeneous and disunited. It also had to face the hostile counter-movement of the Enlightenment and Augustan Neoclassicism, still going strong at the time of and in the decades following the French Revolution due to support from the ruling Establishment (the ancien regime of the Crown and Church of England). Neoclassicists regarded Romanticism as a heteretical amalgam of dissenting new schools, which threatened the monopoly of the Classical Tradition. The acrimonious debates in aesthetics and politics were conducted with the traditional strategies of the classical ars disputandi on both sides. Under the duress of the heaviest satirical attacks, Romanticism began gradually to see itself as one movement, giving rise to the problematic opposition of Classical and Romantic. The construction of this rough divide, however, was indispensable for the clarification of different positions in the hubbub of conflicting voices, and has also proved critical in literary and cultural studies which cannot do without such subsumptions. The Classical Tradition, encompassing Christianity, emerges as an ongoing event from Greek and Latin antiquity running through to our time.

The fifteen essays collected here argue that Roman verse satire should be viewed primarily as an art form, rather than as a social document or a direct expression of social protest. Originally published between 1956 and 1974, they constitute an impressive attempt to free Roman satire from misinterpretations that arose during the romantic era and that continue to plague scholars in the field. The author rejects the proposition that Juvenal and other satirists expressed spontaneous, unadorned anger and that the critic’s best approach is the study of the historical, social, economic and personal circumstances that led to their statement of that anger. This work develops his thesis that Roman satire was designed as a literary form and that the proper stance of the critic is to elucidate its art. Focusing on the dramatic character of the first-person speaker in the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the author shows both how the speaker’s role was shaped to suit the purposes of the individual poems and how that role changed over successive collections of satires. Several essays also discuss the ways in which the satirists employed metaphors and similes and used contemporary ethical and rhetorical themes. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.

William Allan's Very Short Introduction provides a concise and lively guide to the major authors, genres, and periods of classical literature. Drawing upon a wealth of material, he reveals just what makes the 'classics' such masterpieces and why they continue to influence and fascinate today.