Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on specimens of discourse where criticism assumes a flagrantly bucolic persona,
Archeologies of Invective investigates hitherto little acknowledged contexts of irony, aggressivity, and vilification. After considering briefly Lucilius and Horace, the author evaluates such diverse figures as Poggio Bracciolini, Quevedo, Dunbar, Poe, and Mencken before proceeding to sustained discussion of Goethe's
Italian Journey,
Werther, and the Invektiven. In terms of prime-time satiric virtuosity, Byron's
Don Juan recycles pastoral animus, acting as a rogue-like mirror-text of the Schiller/Goethe
Xenien of the late 1790s. Sidney's double sestina and Villon's Ballad of the Women of Paris are seen inaugurating the modern age, while, at the dawn of the avant-garde, Verlaine's Invectives sample Goethean and Villonesque attitude at a new level of recherché vulgarity. Low- and Highbrow, outlaw and Philistine resurface in Wyndham Lewis's Arcadian perspective on th
