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On Satire

by London Review of Books

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Latest episodes

  • 'A Handful of Dust' by Evelyn Waugh

    November 4, 2024 · 16 min

    In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at…

  • 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

    October 4, 2024 · 15 min

    By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in…

  • Byron's 'Don Juan'

    September 4, 2024 · 1 hr 29 min

    Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic…

  • Jane Austen's 'Emma'

    August 4, 2024 · 15 min

    What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction…

  • 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne

    July 4, 2024 · 15 min

    'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning…

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  • 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope

    June 4, 2024 · 13 min

    Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the…

  • John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'

    May 4, 2024 · 13 min

    In 'The Beggar’s Opera' we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is…

  • The Earl of Rochester

    April 4, 2024 · 13 min

    According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s…

  • Ben Jonson's 'Volpone'

    March 4, 2024 · 12 min

    What did English satirists do after the archbishop of Canterbury banned the printing of satires in June 1599? They turned to the stage. Within months of the crackdown, the same satirical tricks Elizabethans had read in verse could be…

  • John Donne's Satires

    February 4, 2024 · 13 min

    In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the…

  • Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly'

    January 4, 2024 · 1 hr 14 min

    Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by…

  • Introducing On Satire

    January 1, 2024 · 14 min

    Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in…

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About the show

Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow attempt, over twelve episodes, to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in all of English literature. What is satire, what is it for, and why do we seem to like it so much? Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the London Review of Books. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from these episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/satireapplesignup⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/satiresignuppod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk