Examples of satirical in the following topics:
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Voltaire
- One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, of incest with his own daughter, led to an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille (after which he adopted the name Voltaire).
- Most of his prose, including such genres as romance, drama, or satire, was written as polemics with the goal of conveying radical political and philosophical messages.
- As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.
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Classical Greek Theater
- Aristophanes, the most important Old Comic dramatist, wrote plays that abounded with political satire, as well as sexual and scatological innuendo.
- Satire and farce occupied less importance in the works of this time, and mythological themes and subjects were replaced by everyday concerns.
- Menander’s comedies focused on the fears and foibles of the ordinary man, as opposed to satirical accounts of political and public life, which perhaps lent to his comparative success within the genre.
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Erasmus
- One of Erasmus's best-known works is In Praise of Folly, a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society in general and the western Church in particular, written in 1509.
- In Praise of Folly starts off with Folly praising herself, after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, whose work Erasmus and Sir Thomas More had recently translated into Latin, a piece of virtuoso foolery; it then takes a darker tone in a series of orations, as Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to a satirical examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church—to which Erasmus was ever faithful—and the folly of pedants.
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Art and Literature in the Roman Republic
- The genre of satire was also common in Rome, and satires were written by, among others, Juvenal and Persius.
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Christine de Pizan
- Written in the 13th century, the Romance of the Rose satirizes the conventions of courtly love while critically depicting women as nothing more than seducers.
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Machiavelli
- For example, Rousseau viewed Machiavelli's work as a satirical piece in which Machiavelli exposes the faults of a one-man rule rather than exalting amorality.