The Literature of Satire by Charles A. Knight (review)

98 One of the most effective ways of coming to terms with Swift’s achievement as a poet is through a recognition of his undeniable impact on subsequent writers, both in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The remaining essays cover various topics. Brean Hammond’s ‘‘Swift’s Reading’’ should have been entitled ‘‘Swift’sLibrary,’’sinceitfocusesonthebooksandpamphlets that Swift decided to preserve for Prince Posterity ratherthanthevastbodyofephemeral literature that he must have read and then allowed to pass into oblivion. In his skillful delineation of Swift’s religious allegiances, Marcus Walsh is undoubtedly right to contend that ‘‘none of Swift’s views on Christian belief, worship, and behavior are significantly at variance with orthodox thinking amongst late seventeenth-century Anglican writers.’’ Yet, like many others who have explored Swift’s Anglican commitments, Mr. Walsh seems to underestimate the intensity of theological controversy during the period, allowing the emergent, if wrongheaded, critique of Swift’s ironies in the Tale, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, and Part Four of the Travels to remain largely unexamined. In Margaret Doody’s sensitive and impassioned essay on ‘‘Swift and Women,’’ Swiftian assumptions about gender range from the repellent to the heartwarming. Swift’s relations with different women were all variations on friendship, and she singles out his encouragement of women writers, including Anne Finch and Mary Barber. There is much to appreciate in this collection, as I hope my comments have made clear, but it is a challenge for introductory readers, especially those seeking guidance on the traditional topics of Swift studies. However, an advanced graduate student will find much to value here. Charles Hinnant University of Missouri-Columbia CHARLES A. KNIGHT. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. ix ⫹ 327. $75. The Literature of Satire is a wide-ranging study, full of valuable insights, the product of many years of reflection on the nature of satire and its various manifestations. Its openness and generosity of spirit, reflected in its unusually wide chronological range, and its treatment of works in Greek, Latin, Russian, French, German, and Portuguese as well as English, are real strengths, but are accompanied by conceptual looseness. In his commendable desire to avoid ‘‘sharp . . . definitions and distinctions that, if not actually fallacious, are reductive and incomplete,’’ Mr. Knight at times inclines toward the arbitrary in his choice of material. A chapter on ‘‘satiric exile,’’ which begins with Ovid and goes on to discuss Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Rushdie’s Shame, and Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, has many stimulating things to say, especially about the extraordinary Pale Fire, but gives no indication why these works should be considered satires. A chapter on ‘‘satire and the novel,’’ over a hundred pages later, includes some potentially illuminating remarks about Menippean satire and postmodernism , alleging ‘‘the partial replacement of the novel by satire’’ or ‘‘the development of a new, more insistently satiric, novel’’in the late twentieth century, butthisdiscussion is brief and general. 99 The lack of a chronological dimension, along with a tendency to jump from one interesting example to another without a clear argument linking them, is particularly pronounced in these two chapters. ‘‘Satire and the novel’’ includes an excellent discussion of Lucian and a brief mapping of two strains in ‘‘the Menippean novel,’’ the Lucianic tradition (Erasmus, Rabelais, Sterne, Peacock, Rushdie) and the Quixotic tradition (Fielding, Smollett, Thackeray). But to illustrate ‘‘the overlapping of novels and satire’’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the only texts discussed in any detail are Roderick Random and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, and, as representative of the Lucianic tradition, Machado de Assis’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. The choice of texts is original and provocative, but, given the topic and approach, more than scattered remarks on Fielding and Sterne would have been welcome. There is material here for at least two chapters, and the argument needs to be fleshed out. The two best chapters in The Literature of Satire are the most specific with detailed and sensitive commentary on texts supporting clear arguments. ‘‘Satire and performance ,’’on dramatic satire, has excellent extended discussions of Jonson’s The Alchemist and Molière’s Le Misanthrope and...