[Andrew Szilvasy]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for a short work of satire--or a collection of satires. It needs to be prose, or mostly prose, and it should be British. Alas, no Candide.

Any suggestions or collections? I'm also going to ask the Twitters.

[RCL]

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim ? I find it hysterically funny!

John Orozco, Delano, if you ever consider an American satire (full disclosure: he's my best friend).

Swift's A Modest Proposal, for much shorter. The epitome of great satire.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks, I do teach Swift in this class. But for this I'd ideally like something more modern.

Lucky Jim is great, but far too long as an individual text for what I need (something that can be either selected from, or read and digested in 4 classes or so).

I do appreciate the suggestions, though.

[Edward Zuk]

Hi Andrew,

I’ll put out some classic and maybe less obvious suggestions to get the ball rolling:

Jonathan Swift: The Battle of the Books, A Modest Proposal
Samuel Johnson: Minim the Critic (Idler 60, 61)
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
Thomas Love Peacock: The Four Ages of Poetry, Nightmare Abbey
Charles Dickens: Hard Times (the shortest of his major novels, I think)
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim

I wish that I could point you towards some more recent examples, but I’m ignorant of them (though I’d love to find out more). I have come across some amusing recent pieces like Theodore Dalrymple’s “It Hurts, Therefore I Am” (available online, with a crude language warning), though. The reason that I haven’t included anything by writers like Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark is that I haven’t read them myself (except for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).

Edit: I see that I've cross-posted with Ralph.

[Mark Blaeuer]

Another that comes to mind is Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

[Edward Zuk]

Now that I have a better idea of what you’re looking for, I’ll suggest:

Orwell: “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”
P.G. Wodehouse: “Jeeves Takes Charge”
Graham Greene: “The Blue Film”
Somerset Maugham: “Rain” and "The Creative Impulse"
H.H. Munro: “Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped”
Anything by Monty Python

Possibilities that I have not read but may be useful:

William Trevor: “The Mark-2 Wife”
Evelyn Waugh’s short stories
Kingsley Amis short stories

[John Isbell]

For Evelyn Waugh, I think Scoop (about journalists) and The Loved One (about undertakers) are fairly short.

Cheers,
John

[RCL]

A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories ?

[Andrew Szilvasy]

John, Edward, Ralph:

Thank you for the suggestions. I'm going to look into all. I actually own The Matisse Stories, but have yet to read it. I'm going to do that now. For everything else, I'll try to obtain copies.

[E. Shaun Russell]

I think Northanger Abbey is a fabulous suggestion. I read it as an undergrad, surrounded by several much younger undergrads, and it was a hit.

Matthew Lewis' The Monk is a bit longer, but amazingly scandalous for a late 18th century novel. It reads very, very well.

Since most of your students have probably already encountered Animal Farm, I humbly suggest Keep the Aspidistra Flying -- one of my personal favorites, but rarely discussed in the Orwell canon. It's fairly short, and is something of a self-satire (an avowed socialist who wants to make money from his poetry etc.).

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita might be too long for them, but you can't get much more delicious as satires go, given that it was written in the early days of the Soviet Union.