Charles Knight's Literature of Satire constitutes a fine palace built on shifting sands. Its bricks are the many celebrated works of Western literature that the text considers, the mortar the erudition that informs it, while the precarious foundation is satire itself. Yet it can be no other way. As Knight explains at the opening of this extremely companionable book, satire has no identity of its own but is rather “a pre-genre … a mental position that needs to adopt a genre in order to express its ideas as representation. Satire, like Satan, as ‘a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’” (4). Artful satire, Knight contends, is a kind of “meta-imitation,” mimicking discourses in order to stress their inherent contradictions, blurring lines of formal demarcation, and inducing literary and linguistic overlaps at a number of levels. Discussing satiric drama, for example, Knight draws our attention to the additional satiric layers that the fact of performance adds to a text, outlining the tripartite operation of satire on linguistic, social, and theatrical levels, with the audience as the ultimate object of its gaze. This is especially the case with Bertolt Brecht, whose Verfremdungseffect is treated here as a satiric practice as much as a political one.

Thinking of satire as pregeneric, a parasitic or viral mode prowling the world for suitable hosts for its expression, allows Knight to escape definitions that have limited other studies. It also permits him to engage freely with the extremely large body of material he takes us through. Knight's is a panoramic text placing Juvenal and Grub Street alongside the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and Salman Rushdie, Menippean satire, Roderick Random, Ben Jonson, Molière, Alexander Pope's Dunciad, and Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Péchuchet, while also taking the time to introduce Anglophone readers to the Russian dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky. Given the scope and mutability of its subject matter, organization is critical if the comparative nature of the study is not to render local details obsolete, a fact that sometimes leads the author to lay his theses out in the form of numbered lists (actually very useful for those wishing to decant various aspects of his argument). Accordingly, the book consists of two distinct parts, the first, “Satiric Boundaries,” comprising three chapters, one on satire's pregeneric volatility and the other two on “Satiric Nationalism” (eighteenth-century satire, including Jonathan Swift and Voltaire) and “Satiric Exile” (Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie), respectively. The second half deals with specific satiric forms, one each on drama, poetry, and the novel and two “case studies” on the eighteenth-century pamphlet war around the fate of the fortifications of Dunkirk and the Viennese journalism of Karl Kraus. These latter chapters are the most focused in terms of placing satire in direct relation to its historical and political context and attempting to describe its relative successes. The chapter on Dunkirk in particular pays close attention to the role satire played in deciding the issue for Whigs, Tories, and the court of public opinion. On the level of information alone, it is fascinating, but in terms of the overall book, these specific examples are maybe a little at odds with the more literary-theoretical chapters on form, which are generally the book's strongest pieces. The chapters on Horatian poetry and the novel commend themselves especially, with Knight reminding us that the novel has always been intricately linked to the history of satire as it takes the satirist's totalizing view of society and dramatizes it in propria persona, placing a fictionalized individual in an antagonistic relationship to the society around while negotiating its complex and contradictory codes.

Overall, this is an extremely valuable book that deals well with a self-avowedly slippery topic, and one that ultimately may have taken its revenge, as although Knight's necessary looseness with the definition of satire allows him to construct a comparative analysis of such broad range, it also suggests an implicit uniformity of satire stable enough to permit a study of this kind that takes in cultures and centuries at a glance.