Friday, May 03, 2013
Satire
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), "Fan-Fare," Life (April 8, 1946), rpt. in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), pp. 300-3046 (at 304):
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Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards — the early Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Europe. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.