Travesty (literature)

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Travesty is a comical or satirical literary genre, commonly a poetry, in which the plot of a well-known myth or a serious literary work in retold in a comical form. [1] [2] [3] [4] The genre overlaps with parody, but differs from the latter in that a travesty follows the plot of the original, but the style is different, while a parody follows the style, but not necessarily the plot. [5] [2] [6] Also, a travesty serves primarily for an amusement of the reader, while a parody is often a literary weapon. [4]

Contents

Etymology

Paul Scarron's title "Virgile travesti" gave rise to the English term for the genre. [1] The French verb travestir means "to change the dress", "to disguise"; it also gave rise to other meanings of the word "travesty".

Examples

Examples are multiple travesties of Virgil, [6] such as Giovanni Battista Lalli's L'Eneide travestita (1634), Paul Scarron's "Virgile travesti" (1648–52) [1] and Aloys Blumauer's "Virgil's Aeneid" (1783). In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–96), the humorous retelling of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend may be considered as an early example of the genre. [1]

In 1791 the Russian poet N. P. Osipov published Aeneid Turned Inside Out  [ ru ] (Russian : Виргилиева Энеида, вывороченная наизнанку, lit.  'Vergil's Aeneid, turned inside out'). Ivan Kotliarevsky's mock-epic poem Eneida (Ukrainian: Енеїда), written in 1798, is considered to be the first literary work published wholly in the modern Ukrainian language. The Belarusian-language travesty, Aeneid Inside Out  [ be ] was written in the first half of the 19th century and attributed either to Vikentsiy Ravinski  [ be ] (Wincenty Rowiński) or to Ihnat Mankowsky  [ be ].

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 travesty, Britannica
  2. 1 2 Wikisource-logo.svg  "Травести"  . Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (in Russian). 1906.
  3. ↑ Theodor Verweyen, Gunther Witting, "Travestie". In: Klaus Weimar et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2007, vol. 3, ISBN   978-3-11-091467-2, p. 684
  4. 1 2 Gero von Wilpert, "Travestie", In: Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Kröners Taschenausgabe. Vol. 231). 4., Kröner, Stuttgart, 1964, p. 738.
  5. ↑ August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst, 1802-1803
  6. 1 2 Susanna Braund, Travesty: The Ultimate Domestication of Epic, 1 June 2019
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