This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
This is the first collection of literary parodies, both poetry and prose, written during the English Romantic period. Many anthologies of literary parody have been published during the past century, but no previous selection has concentrated so intensively on a single period in English literary history, and no period in that history was more remarkable for the quantity and diversity of its parody. There was no Romantic writer untouched by parody, either as subject or as author, or even occasionally as both. Most parodies were intended to discredit the Romantics not only as poets but as individuals, and to disarm the threat they were seen as posing to establish literary and social norms. Because it focuses on the "swarm of imitative writers" about whom Robert Southey complained in an 1819 letter to Walter Savage Landor, this collection throws light on a large and often overlooked body of work whose authors had much more serious purposes than mere ridicule or amusement. Romantic parody situates itself between the eighteenth-century craft of burlesque and the nonsense verse that Victorian parody often became. This anthology demonstrates that parody is concerned with power: that it expresses ideological conflict, dramatizing clashes of ideas, styles, and values between different generations of writers, different classes and social groups, and even between writers of the same generation and class. Parody is not an inherently conservative mode; politically, it serves the whole range of opinion from extreme left to extreme right. While several of the parodies are playful - a few even affectionate - most angrily testify to the political, social, and aesthetic divisions embittering the times. Some parodies have aged more gracefully than others. But all contribute to a more vivid understanding of the era and to the reception accorded the most important Romantic writers. The venom and alarm of the response those writers provoked may surprise anyone who takes it for granted that the Romantics easily made their way into the mainstream of English literature. This volume reprints parodies by the major Romantics (including Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley) as well as by minor, obscure, and anonymous contemporaries. Several longer, better-known texts are given in their entirety, e.g., Peter Bell, Peter Bell III, and The Vision of Judgment, and there are also examples from distinguished collections such as Rejected Addresses, The Poetic Mirror, and Warreniana. Numerous shorter works are taken from periodicals of the time (such as Blackwood's or The Satirist), and many of these are reprinted for the first time since their initial publication. The foreword by Linda Hutcheon, "Parody and Romantic Ideology," examines the theoretical implications of Romantic parodies. The introduction, headnotes, and annotations by the editors place the parodies in their historical, social, and literary contexts.
This volume collects together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt.
Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It argues that parody is central to the whole modernist project, even to supposedly earnest movements such as Imagism, and not just to the extreme avant-garde antics of Dada. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, define themselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing. It offered a ready method to laugh at folly, amuse friends, criticize opponents, spike enemies, and transgress conventions. Being double-coded, parody proved a powerful weapon in the culture wars, enabling modernists to present and simultaneously challenge prevailing ideologies in all their historically determined complexity. Its fundamentally dialogic and palimpsestual form exposed the limitations of naïve mimesis, insisting that literature is always language in unstable play, while simultaneously foregrounding the relational structures that underwrote the modernists' paradoxical claims to originality and modernity. As a principle of continual genesis-and a spur to the production of yet more forcefully experimental art-parody therefore became the modernists' primary reflex as they negotiated their position in literary culture and made it new.