This chapter explores the central role of nostalgia, youth, and memory across the works of William Burroughs, challenging his reputation as an anti-sentimental icon of literary transgression. Thom Robinson traces Burroughs’ shifting relationship with nostalgia – from early satirical treatments in The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, through the melancholic repetitions of the cut-up era, to the queer adolescent utopias of his later novels. These texts, including The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads, draw heavily on Burroughs’ own youth, subvert the moral codes of institutions like the Boy Scouts of America, and reimagine coming-of-age as a site of resistance and sexual awakening. Through his admiration for Denton Welch and incorporation of children’s literature tropes, Burroughs ultimately transforms nostalgia from a regressive impulse into a creative, disruptive force – an affective mechanism through which the past might be rescripted in defiance of normative adulthood.

Comedy’s commercialization, political role, and media domination mark its American evolution. Initially, humorists like Mark Twain reigned. But comedy’s move into mass media emphasized anarchic energy and gags until1920s radio and movies incorporated sound to expand humorous storytelling, witty dialogue. From these developments appeared the sitcom, a genre seized upon by early TV. Vaudeville’s comedic legacy also infiltrated TV variety shows that, by the 1960s, incorporated more provocative humor. Late-night talk shows emerged as a “gateway” for stand-up comedians. TV comedy became better known for expressing changing American values in Norman Lear’s 1960s sitcoms and Saturday Night Live’s 1975 parody sketches. Although most movie and TV comedy was not socially engaged, The Simpsons and other 1990s prime-time animation refashioned cultural parody while The Daily Show popularized the satirical newscast. Contemporary comedies embrace wider diversity highlighting gay, non-White, and female characters and narrative experimentation now that digital media compete for audiences.

This chapter evaluates the Life of Aesop as a fictional biography that traces Aesop’s rise from mute slave to celebrated orator, dramatizing a subversive educational trajectory. Through contests with slaveowners and sophists, Aesop acquires the rhetorical authority associated with elite paideia—yet weaponizes elementary techniques like gnome, chreia, and fable to challenge the prestige of rhetorical schooling. Special focus is given to Aesop’s divine acquisition of speech, his parody of the Platonic Phaedrus, and his schooling under the philosopher Xanthus. The chapter argues that the Life inverts the structure of the rhetorical curriculum: whereas fables were taught as preliminary exercises, Aesop reserves them for the height of his intellectual ascent, delivering animal tales before public assemblies as political counsel. In this way, the Life not only reclaims muthos as a legitimate form of public speech but also reimagines "fiction competence" as the true test of education.

This chapter considers the comic dimensions of Sancho’s correspondence. Sancho’s humor draws on British national culture to interrogate divisions within the community and to prompt readers to notice lines separating insiders from outsiders. Sancho uses farce to create internal tiers of closeness within his group of affiliates, parody to forge pathways for bonding with strangers, and satire to criticize society while also promoting recognition of commonalities.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This essay analyses Elizabeth Bowen’s comedy. It first focuses on the influence of English and Irish comic traditions on Bowen’s humour, especially her debts to Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. It then considers the historical and theoretical contexts that inform her comic fiction, written in the shadow of two world wars and a period of conflict and immense change in Ireland, and in the wake of important developments in the theory of humour itself, including interventions by Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. Bowen’s humour forms an intrinsic part of how she situates herself within literary traditions, and how she engages with themes of class and social tension, cross-cultural encounter and conflict. Bowen’s self-reflexive, ironic style employs modes such as comedy of manners, dark humour, gothic parody, mechanical humour, and satire.

This chapter explores the poetry of G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) as a medium for expressing political ideas, highlighting his dual identity as a socialist intellectual and poet. While Cole is best remembered for promoting guild socialism and contributing to economic history and the Fabian Society, he also published poetry, which he saw as part of his political life. His early and middle-age works, including New Beginnings (1914) and The Crooked World (1933), reflect a serious literary approach, aspiring to integrate historical verse forms within socialist thought. Cole’s poetic output also embraced satire, with The Bolo Book (1921) parodying hymns and popular songs to critique political figures and issues humorously. This blend of literary and satirical genres allowed him to engage readers in socialist discourse through varied tones and forms. By examining both the poetry itself and its cultural reception, this chapter illuminates how Cole’s verse contributed to and reflected British socialist culture in the early twentieth century, offering insight into how poetry served as a vehicle for political engagement in his era.

In this chapter, I interpret Plato’s Cratylus as an ideal comedy and argue that Plato employs the comedic technique of parody in order to expose rival methodologies as sources of ridiculous self-ignorance. Socrates’ extended parody of etymology shows that words cannot be a guide to the nature of being, since we have no reason to think that their analysis can teach us anything about reality. Etymology is, in short, a source of laughable self-ignorance because it provides its practitioners with the illusion of wisdom. Parody generally involves the use of an imitation that exaggerates or distorts some feature of the original, often in order to undermine its claim to authority. In the case of etymology, Plato’s parody not only exposes etymology as a false path to wisdom, but it also articulates specific criticisms of etymology regarding its methodology, its scope and its alleged systematicity. The function and purpose of the very long etymological section has proved highly puzzling to interpreters who are generally unsure what to make of it, and my account reveals the etymologies to be playing a central, and previously unnoticed, role in the overall argument of the dialogue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.

The topic of competition starts with translators’ incorporation of others’ versions into their own texts, then moves on to translators’ prefaces where they situate themselves in relation to particular predecessors, such as Leopardi’s relationship with Caro’s sixteenth-century Eneide. I examine in depth the self-positioning and self-fashioning in the paratexts in the English tradition of Aeneid translations from Caxton down to Wordsworth. The second section deals with the phenomenon of ‘retranslation’, which has two manifestations: when translators lift elements from preceding translations and when they revisit their own earlier versions and modify them. Then I consider competition with Virgil himself, starting with the challenge to Paul Valéry to translate the Eclogues. The chapter concludes with brief consideration of parody and travesty of Virgil as special forms of retranslation, with examples from a seventeenth-century Dutch collaboration on the Eclogues, a seventeenth-century parody of Eclogue 1 by an Irishman and an eighteenth-century travesty of the Aeneid in German.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

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.