The Art of Satire

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How to classify and criticize the variegated material known as satire and as satirical literature, is one of the puzzling questions of literary criticism. Here David Worcester has presented a theory of satire, surveying the whole field since Dryden’s Discourse of the Origin and Progress of Satire and drawing illustrations not only from English but from classical, French, German, and American literatures. At the same time he has made a penetrating study of irony and its uses. The volume is a fresh, original, and stimulating approach to literary theory and practice, which we commend to the general reader as well as to the critic.