Friday, September 12, 2014

What are some types of satire?I would like at least 2 examples of each.

Johnathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels' and George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' are two better known examples of the satire (both political allegories. Although Orwell's novel '1984' was futuristic, it is not really a science fiction story but rather a cautionary tale. It is probably too serious in tone to be considered a satire).

If you want a shorter work, take Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" (available on 'project gutenberg')  as a source of study. Written actually about a century before the potato famine in Ireland, it proposes cooking and eating children, even offering some tips to diversify the dish!

A modern example of satire would be the Harry Potter series in children's literature, which, among other things, makes mirth at the expense of the British educational system, particularly boarding schools for very young children. This is not the primary intention of the book, but the reader can get some good laughs just the same.

In French literature,  Rabelais's fantasy novels 'Pantagruel' and 'Gargantua' (1532 and 1534) were also political jabs at how the state and church had depleted the resources of the people. (Similar to parts of Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels.') Both works were censured for a while (of course, adding to their public appeal!) as being too provocative.

In poetry, "Dover Bitch" is a spoof of Matthew Arnold's serious poem "Dover Beach." (A satire which assumes the same form of the work it is mocking is called a parody.) "The Ten Commandments" of the Old Testament were 'rewritten' in an ironic way by the poem "The Last Decalogue.'

All these various literary genres are examples of satire.

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