In its eleven essays, Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism re-explores old issues from new perspectives while opening up new dimensions of satire for critical analysis.

Adapting to its object of study - a genre named after the Roman hash satura lanx - this eclectic collection brings the insights of New Criticism, philology, rhetorical analysis, anthropology, genre theory, semiotics, deconstruction, cultural criticism, and the new historicism to bear upon classical, British, continental, and American satire. These essays seek useful generalizations about satire while at the same time offering close readings of individual authors whose work in a variety of cultural and temporal settings has broadened and enriched the genre. In discussions that range from Lucilius to Joe Bob Briggs, the collection passes through the verse of Horace, Pope, and Swift, novels of the German Enlightenment, the operas of W.S. Gilbert, the lyrics of John Berryman, and the postmodernist British campus novel.

Each essay attempts to bring something of profit to the satiric neophyte and specialist alike.