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Literary notes about parody (AI summary)

Literary parody is a versatile device that both imitates and distorts original texts for humorous or critical effect. Authors use the term to indicate works that mimic the style, subject matter, or tone of a preexisting piece, often to expose its absurdities, whether by evoking classical epic traditions [1, 2, 3, 4] or by skewering contemporary social and political narratives [5, 6, 7]. In this way, parody may serve as a loving homage or a trenchant critique, allowing writers to transform familiar motifs into something new and thought-provoking [8, 9, 10].
  1. It was a parody of the ‘Freres Ennemis’, by Racine.
    — from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova
  2. [80] This a parody on two lines in the Antiope of Euripides: Γνώμῃ γὰρ ἀνδρὸς εὖ μὲν οἰκοῦνται πόλεις, Εὖ δ’ οἶκος εἴς τ’ αὖ πόλεμον ἰσχύει μέγα.
    — from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
  3. This pedigree of Belinda's bodkin is a parody of Homer's account of Agamemnon's scepter ( Iliad , II, 100-108).
    — from The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems by Alexander Pope
  4. The speech of Clarissa is a parody of a famous speech by Sarpedon in the Iliad , XII, 310-328.
    — from The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems by Alexander Pope
  5. A parody of a pro-slavery speech in Congress.
    — from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  6. At every other point the king was an absurd parody of the Professor.
    — from The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
  7. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that parody, masquerading there in the firelight as Défago.
    — from The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
  8. [Note 57: The above three lines are a parody on the turgid style of Lomonossoff, a literary man of the second Catherine's era.]
    — from Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
  9. My heart thudded and my blood sang in a cruel parody of the way I'd felt when we got home.
    — from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  10. Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody.
    — from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

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