The 10th of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the story of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he returns to a peace-time life at the end of World War II…. Read More ›
satire in literature
Analysis of Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random
Tobias Smollett’s first novel reflected both the reading interests of the day and Smollett’s own attitude toward fiction. As a picaresque with first-person narration, the novel offered readers an action-centered story with a rogue main character, but Roderick Random could… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist
Likely Charles Dickens’s best-known novel, Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy’s Progress, first appeared in serial form in Bentley’s Miscellany between February 1837 and April 1839. The author’s third novel, it would later become the most dramatized of any fictional… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry Fielding’s The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great
Henry Fielding received some criticism for romanticizing a common criminal in his novel The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great. Based on the career of a well-known criminal executed earlier in the 18th century, the… Read More ›
Analysis of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift likely began writing Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships five years before its publication. Later known simply as Gulliver’s Travels,… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert S. Hichens’s The Green Carnation
When Robert S. Hichens published his roman à clef, or novel with a key, The Green Carnation, he joined others in mimicking the famous style of Oscar Wilde, arguably England’s best-known writer at the end of the 19th century. Wilde,… Read More ›
Analysis of Marmion Savage’s The Falcon Family
Marmion Savage’s first novel, The Falcon Family; or, Young Ireland, satirized parasitic socialites, traditionalists within the Church of England, and the Young Ireland Party, a group of extremists who campaigned for Ireland’s independence. Published anonymously, the novel proved popular, although… Read More ›
Analysis of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon took its place in an honored tradition as satire against what Butler perceived as the intellectual, emotional, and moral stagnation of English society and human nature in general. Revolting against the Victorian values that negatively affected English… Read More ›
Analysis of George Meredith’s The Egoist
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity. In doing so, he satirized himself. He felt he… Read More ›
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