Art Attack: Names in Satire [Paperback]

Leonard R.N. Ashley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2003

Satire is especially interesting because it connects literature to realityand comments upon and raises questions about morality, psychology,and social dynamics. It creates dual audiences, the attacked and the attackers but also those who get the joke and those who do not--.from the Preface In ART ATTACK you will learn how to get the joke when names are sticks and stones to break the bones in prose and verse and drama. You will see all the many techniques at work (with hilarious examples) in the works of such American writers as Ludwig Bemelmans and S. J. Perelman and such British satirists as Evelyn Waugh, Tom Sharpe, Anthony Burgess, and Martin Amis (whose terrorist attack on New York in Money was devastating). Art Attack ranges from squibs and newspaper columns ('Peter Simple') to major works of eighteenth-century comedy to modern literature. You will see satire in long and short novels, parody and burlesque, even vulgar folklore, what Philip Roth calls 'moral outrage transformed into comic art' in a variety of attacks and techniques. I have long shared [Ashley's] recognition of the fact that the use ofsignificant names is one of the most efficient and effective rhetoricaltechniques that an author can use to make points--.Ashley's excellentbook [shows]--authors are ready, willing, and with the use of namesand other devices very able to warn us of error and threaten us withdire consequences if we do not listen to their warnings.--Prof. Don L. F. Nilsen (Arizona State University),Executive Secretary, International Society for Humor StudiesArt Attack is not only about a wonderful selection of great wits but it iswritten by a great wit. I learned a lot but most of all I laughed loud and long. -- Louis A. de Montluzin

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Leonard R. N. Ashley, Ph.D. (Princeton), LHD (Columbia Theological, Hon.), is Professor Emeritus of Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, where he taught for nearly thirty-five years. He was earlier on the faculties of The University of Utah, The University of Rochester, and (part time) The New School for Social Research. He spent several years in The Royal Canadian Air Force where, as second assistant to The Air Historian, he wrote (for NORAD) the top-secret report on The Air Defense of North America.His published works range from military history (collaboration on A Military History of Modern China, authorship of Ripley's 'Believe It Or Not' Book of The Military) and critical biography (Colley Cibber and George Peele) to literary history (Authorship and Evidence in Renaissance Drama and Elizabethan Popular Culture) and linguistics (What's in a Name? and co-editorship of the proceedings of half a dozen conferences he has directed for The American Society of Geolinguistics - of which he has been repeatedly elected president since 1991). He is the author of numerous textbooks and anthologies such as Other People's Lives, Mirrors for Man, Nineteenth-Century British Drama, and Tales of Mystery and Melodrama. Recently he has written a series of ten books on the occult published by Barricade Books (New York) and reprinted by several British publishers and in Dutch and German translations. These books are: The Complete Book of Superstition, Prophecy, and Luck; The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft; The Complete Book of Devils and Demons; The Complete Book of the Devil's Disciples; The Complete Book of Spells, Curses, and Magical Recipes; The Complete Book of Vampires; and The Complete Book of Werewolves, The Complete Book of Dreams and What They Mean, and The Complete Book of Sex Magic. He has published poetry in more than sixty 'little magazines' and anthologies, more than 150 scholarly articles in journals on a variety of subjects (in 2001, for instan

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: AuthorHouse (May 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0759689075
• ISBN-13: 978-0759689077
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,594,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)