When considering the fate of satire in the twentieth century, it is easy to find ourselves retailing dubious clichés of literary periodization. We are tempted to say that in the passage from Victorian to modernist fiction there comes a fundamental shift in the hierarchy of genres. Satire, which played a crucial role in the emergence of the English novel in the 1700s, only to be largely abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century, suddenly reappears at the fin de siècle and within a few decades reclaims its original prominence and stature. Drawing on Northrop Frye's scheme of generic mythos and archetypes, which associates satire with winter, we could then describe the genre's resurgence in the modernist period as part of a major change in the literary climate, the warm sentiment of Victorian fiction giving way to modernism's famed coldness, impersonality, and detachment.

Though reductive and misleading (and not just with regard to the Victorians), this narrative of satire's near-fatal collapse and dramatic recovery is not altogether false. But we should recall that even in its abstract lineaments Frye's scheme allows no pure instances; in each of its six “phases,” satire is blended with elements either of tragedy or of comedy. We are dealing with matters of degree rather than kind, and indeed with modalities of affect rather than with genre in the strictly formal sense. What happened toward the turn of the last century is not that a certain kind of text, the satiric form of the novel, having been effectively banished in the mid-nineteenth century, suddenly enjoys a revival.