Satire
Samuel the Seeker
What would happen to you if you tried to make your way in the world believing all the clear, simple things you had ever been taught growing …
The Misanthrope
Alceste, the misanthrope, hates everyone including himself. But unlike in many pure farces with their cliche stock characters, the character…
Lesley Castle
Lesley Castle is a melodramatic epistolary novelette written by Jane Austen when she was sixteen years old. Although the novels Austen becam…
Arms and The Man
Arms and the Man is a comedy written by George Bernard Shaw, and was first produced in 1894 and published in 1898, and has become one of the…
Lucian's Dialogues
The Dialogues of the Gods are 26 miniature dialogues mocking the Homeric conception of the Greek gods written in Attic Greek by Syrian autho…
John Donne's Satires
Donne’s StyleIn John Donne’s day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose. Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology…
The Wit and Humor of America
The Wit and Humor of America is a delightful collection that showcases the rich tapestry of American wit and humor through a selection of sh…
Satires
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known in English as Juvenal, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD. The details of the …
Don Juan
Don Juan "contains, perhaps, more severe attacks upon hypocrisy than does even Tartuffe. It depicts the hero as a man who, rich, noble,…
Absalom and Achitophel
John Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem in 1681. It is an elaborate historical allegory using the political situation faced by …
Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are
This Restoration-Era comedy of manners satirizes the hypocrisy, gamesmanship, and imbalance of power inherent in the institution of marriage…
The Pickwick Papers
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, is the first novel by Charles Dickens. Written for publicat…
The Glugs of Gosh
First published in 1917, The Glugs of Gosh satirizes Australian life at the start of the twentieth century - but the absurdities it catalogs…
The Misses Mallett
The arrival of the eligible Francis Sales disturbs the calm existence of the four Misses Mallett in this social satire. Three women love him…
The Miser
The Miser is a comedy of manners about a rich moneylender named Harpagon. His feisty children long to escape from his penny-pinching househo…
A Common Story
Alexander Fedoritch Adouev is the naïve, pampered son of Anna Pavlovna, a provincial landowner. He decides to go off to Saint Petersbur…
The Tysons
Another frank May Sinclair exploration of fin de siècle English love and sex, marriage and adultery, "The Tysons" is the st…
Orlando, A Biography
Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking satire of British culture, customs, literature, philosophy, and politics from the Elizabethan era to the aut…
The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson
Billed as a satire concerning the dishonest advertising and business practices of the day, it tells the tale of an upstart clothing business…
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, or simply Shamela, as it is more commonly known, is a satirical novel written by Henry Fiel…