The Literature of Satire is an accessible but sophisticated and widerangingstudy of satire from the classics to the present in plays, novels, and the press aswell as in verse. In it Charles Knight analyses the rhetorical problems created by satire’s complex relations to its community, and examines how it exploits the genres it borrows. He argues that satire derives froman awareness of the differences between appearance, ideas, and discourse. Knight provides illuminating readings of such satirists familiar and unfamiliar as Horace, Lucian, Jonson, Moli`ere, Swift, Pope, Byron, Flaubert, Ostrovsky, Kundera, and Rushdie. This broad-ranging examination sheds new light on the nature and functions of satire as a mode of writing, as well as on theoretical approaches to it.