Satire Note 3.2

Secondly, definitions of satire usually note that it has the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Its aim is therefore described as constructive social criticism, which would mean that there is something inherently liberal about certain traditions of satire, in which a free-speech based public sphere is meant to correct certain vices, thereby facilitating progress – hence, I think, the frequent presence of this word in early satires: see, for example, John Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) or Swift’s titles ‘Phyllis, or, The Progress of Love’ and ‘The Progress of Beauty.’ Progress actually meant something different for Swift – he thought of modernity as arrogant, progress as a degeneration. [Pat Rogers, ‘Swift the Poet,’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 177-201: p. 183.] See also Hogarth’s ‘The Progress of the Rake’ (1732-4). Anyway, I think the prevalence of liberal satire is predicated in some ways on this new understanding of progress and its relation to satire. Making satire into a call for abolition gets at how Verity Spott’s work, and the work of others, isn’t quite what is usually called satire – see negative vs. positive critique in Satire Note 1.