On Satire

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 his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsFurther reading in the LRB:Seamus Perry:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hellJohn Bayley:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-timeColm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaolFrank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honeyColin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.Get in touch: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byronhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mindMarilyn Butler: Successhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/successJohn Mullan: Hidden Consequenceshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequencesThomas Jones: On Top of Everythinghttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everythingColin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.Get in touch: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Barbara Everetthttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romanceJohn Bayleyhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screamingMarilyn Butlerhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-processColin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.Get in touch: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.