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Howard D. Weinbrot. Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 375.
From his first book, The Formal. Strain (1969), on Augustan imitation and satire, through a book on Augustus Caesar in "Augustan" England (1978), and a volume on Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (1982), to his massive study of "the rise of British Literature from Dryden to Sheridan" in Britannia's Issue (1993), along with several volumes of essays, Howard Weinbrot has over a period of nearly forty years established a reputation for exhaustively researched and vigorously argued - sometimes polemical-scholarship. His work has centered on eighteenth-century satire, and, combining formalist and historical (old historical) critical approaches, has insisted that we can understand the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and others only if we read them with an understanding of the "traditions" within which they were written. His latest book, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, adds to his formidable record, and complements his earlier work on "formal verse satire" by taking on what he regards as the other main strand of satire, the long and diverse tradition of "Menippean satire."
As readers of Weinbrot have come to expect, his work is wide-ranging-extending from the "foundation texts" (p. 5) by Varro, Petronius, Seneca, Julian, and Lucian to writings by the major eighteenth-century satirists, Swift and Pope. Going back to the primary texts himself, Weinbrot looks in considerable detail at satirical writings that few modern scholars have examined closely, including not only the satiric fragments left by Varro, but also the writings of Fénelon and the authors of the Satyre Menippé. And he displays, as he has in the past, a remarkable grasp of the writers in both French and English who have commented on or translated Menippean writings, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (As a sign of his unbending insistence on primary writings, and on a scholar's responsibility to read them in the original, Weinbrot and his publisher do not translate the French.) Never much interested in present-day theory, he prefers to consult the descriptive accounts and theoretical claims of writers contemporary with his satirists, and to generalize from what he regards as the central formal and thematic elements in the writings...