The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying
Maria Plaza
Abstract
Our image of Roman satire has developed from that of a static, moralizing genre to a deliberately complex form, but our approach to the humour intrinsic to satire has not developed accordingly. This book offers a comprehensive new analysis of humour in the writings of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, with an excursus to Lucilius. The main thesis is that far from being an external means of sweetening the moral lesson, humour lies at the heart of Roman satire and shapes its paradoxical essence. The book argues that while the satirist needs humour for the aesthetic merit of his work, his ideological ... More
Our image of Roman satire has developed from that of a static, moralizing genre to a deliberately complex form, but our approach to the humour intrinsic to satire has not developed accordingly. This book offers a comprehensive new analysis of humour in the writings of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, with an excursus to Lucilius. The main thesis is that far from being an external means of sweetening the moral lesson, humour lies at the heart of Roman satire and shapes its paradoxical essence. The book argues that while the satirist needs humour for the aesthetic merit of his work, his ideological message inevitably suffers from the ambivalence that humour carries. By analyzing object-oriented humour, humour directed at the speaker (including self-irony), and humour directed at neither object nor subject, the book shows how the Roman satirists work round this double mission of morals and merriment. As a result, they present the reader with a much more sprawling and ‘open’ literary product than they promise in their programmatic self-presentations. The argument is rounded off by a contemplation of the end of Roman satire, and its descendants — not only modern satire but also the novel, in which satire’s humorous orchestration of epic questions was later taken up and richly elaborated.
Keywords:
paradox,
Lucilius,
Horace,
Persius,
Juvenal,
target,
self-irony,
openness
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199281114 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281114.001.0001 |