Satire Literature Reviews Samples For Students

Classical English literature studies

Comedy – a professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh. Late Middle English (as a genre of drama, also denoting a narrative poem with a happy ending, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy): from Old French comedie, via Latin from Greek kōmōidia, from kōmōidos 'comic poet', from kōmos 'revel' + aoidos 'singer'. ("Comedy: Definition Of Comedy in Oxford Dictionary (American English)").
Aristotle defines comedy as an imitation of men, who is worse than the average, but not in their perversities, but in hilarious sense. Comedy, as a genre ...

Jonathan Swift’s powerful satire offers a misanthropist’s perspective of the world, one who has lost faith in and has succumbed to the disillusionment in humankind. Gulliver’s Travels is a glimpse into the real state of the human race, with most salient attacks on the social aspect of it: politics, religion, governmental structure and finally, the essence of what it means to be human. However, at the very end of the novel, it becomes clear that only a person who profoundly cares about the state of humanity could have written a work that touches upon all these issues in such a satirical ...

Plot Summary

The Great Gatsby is a book that focuses and tries to give the events of a fictional town and characters. The plot is focused on Nick a former graduate scholar and a war veteran who is the narrator of the story that the novel aims at putting across. Nick takes up employment as a salesperson in the City of New York, where he settles and takes up residence in long island near the exclusive mansion of the rich mysterious jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is known in the town due to the exclusive and huge parties that he holds in his residence. During Nick’s ...

Many people misunderstand Tartuffe, and religion’s role in the comedy. When it was first performed for King Louis XIV, the initial perception was that it was a satire of religion. The result of this was that the play was initially banned. One of the reasons why the ban was lifted was that each competing faction of the church felt it was a parody of the other. In reality, the play is not a satire any one religion or of religion in general; it is a portrayal of a religious hypocrite.
Tartuffe is a the “Impostor” as a guest in Orgon’s home he attempts ...

The play “The Importance of being Earnest” was written by Oscar Wilde, and was first seen in a theater in 1895. The play is a comedy which uses various literary techniques to bring out various themes in the Victorian era. Irony is a major literary technique in the play in which the protagonist named Jack uses the name Earnest as an alibi whenever he wishes to escape from his reality. He has created an imaginary character in his head in which he has a younger brother by the name Earnest (Wilde 15). In his real world, he is however ...

Jane Austen is one of the most well known writers to come out of the nineteenth century and one of the most recognized female writers of all time. She is revered as a literary influence and many of her works are studied in English classes all throughout North America. She is part of the romanticism era of literature, and many of her works focus on the lives of people in upper-class Britain. One of her most well-known novels is Pride and Prejudice and this stands as a classic piece of literature from the nineteenth century. It is essential to ...

Voltaire has been considered as a writer of the Enlightenment era, where the writers would initiate a change in the way of the present society through their writings. In his book Candide, Voltaire sought to satirize the entire theme of the way women were treated in the 1800s. While the book's main protagonist is a male, the underlining's of the book is based on a female, Cunegonde. The protagonist of the book, Candide lives at the mayor's house under the study of Doctor Pangloss. Candide falls in love with the daughter of the mayor, Cunegonde. However, when the mayor ...

Setting the Stage: The Themes in Chapters 1-3

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a hybrid between a manifesto of ideas, brought forth by characters with only a patina of depth, and a story with the depth closer to a graphic novel than that of a traditional tome. The opening three chapters bring the majority of the significant themes or ideas at work in the book. The director explains how this particular Utopia provides people bred to order, using artificial fertilization to grow babies inside bottles. Ultimately, they are not born but instead are decanted. Each new person is assigned to one of five social castes, from the Alphas, who have the most ...

“When we read Dickenswe are reading all sorts of other things at the same time—plot, character, moral dilemma, historical predicament, and so forth—but we can see all these in their full complexity only if we attend to the illuminating play of style” (Alter 1996). Indeed, Charles Dickens is a master of style and a versatile genius. He weaves magic with his words that takes the readers into a rapturous world of imagination. The power of his words and imagination manifested in his depiction of simple stories and building of characters make him one of the most popular English novelists of ...

The times in which Jonathan Swift wrote were certainly grim enough to inspire writing about what a utopian society might resemble, or what it might take to make society better. As a priest in Ireland, Swift was certainly in a position to see the plight of the Irish poor. The indifference of the British government to this plight was the motivation for one of the first major rhetorical pieces to use sarcasm as a device; his essay “A Modest Proposal” gave Irish anger a voice that continues to resonate today (Spratt). The suggestion of that “proposal,” which was to sell the infants of the ...

I used two 20th Century sources about the demographic and economic conditions of Ireland at the time Swift write “A Modest Proposal”, and in my opinion these would have strengthened the paper overall by placing it in a more detailed historical context. Neither of the articles would have changed my basic conclusions that Ireland was suffering from extreme poverty, hunger and poverty because of England’s colonial policies. They would have offered further proof of my main thesis that even though Swift’s essay was intended only to be satire, he had a very serious political purpose. In my opinion, during ...

PART-I: CHARACTER SKETCH OF “THE WIFE OF BATH”

In the Prologue to The Wife of Bath Tale, we come across a woman, who in medieval times was regarded as a “wicked Woman” because she had married five times. She gives an account of her five marriages out of which three husbands were good and two were bad. She has been presented as a woman who does not care about what the world says about her character. She lives life on her own rules and if someone criticizes her on her five marriages she rebukes by saying that the holy figures like Jacob and Abraham married so many times so why ...

Monkey is a folk novel of china written by Wu Chengen in the sixteenth century. This book is considered one of the most admired and classic novels of the country. Monkey is a fictional account of Xuan Zang’s journey to India. He visited India with four other disciples, as per the instructions of Buddha to gain knowledge of sutras. These four were also the protectors of xuan zang during his journey and saved him at various occasions. The book is an interesting compilation of several incidents which keeps the readers attached throughout with the book. There are almost hundred chapters ...