Restoration & NeoClassical Lit Blog

What makes satire, satire? Should one who wishes to use satire possess any special skills? What exactly is satire, and why is this blog post dedicated to it? Okay, so these may be some of the questions that you are asking yourself, and if you are, then you have clicked on the right blog post. Congratulations! I believe that I will start analyzing these questions in reverse order. Let’s begin. What is satire? According to the Norton Anthology, satire is, simply, “a genre … the communication, in the form of a letter between equals, complaining of the ills of contemporary society” (A 23). Satire is designed to ridicule, usually directed towards a person or a specific class, to point out their absurdity. This leads us to the next question concerning what skills are needed by one who wishes to employ satire . Being that satire attempts to ridicule a determined individual, or group, the one using satire to accomplish this must know how to use literary devices such as irony, sarcasm,...

Imagine that you are living in a time where you were expected to maintain staunch devotion to religion and to endure unethical treatment from those in authority. Imagine a time that theaters were closed and it was forbidden to participate in science, logic, and reasoning, which were all deemed as heretical. My point is that life, in this way, according to these constructs, is hard to imagine, right? Well, that is exactly the way that life was prior to the 1600s, which marked the beginning of the Restoration period.  There was no push for personal liberties and rights, which left the majority of the people feeling hopeless and in despair. Also, society was based on a hierarchical structure that differentiated between the affluent and the beggarly. Independent thought was not only poorly celebrated and disregarded but, on certain accounts, was punishable by death. Anything that differentiated from what the Church taught was not easily promoted, causing the masses to fear religio...