The humorous poetry of late medieval Scotland is diverse in genre, including among its forms the drinking song, farce, parody, burlesque, elrich fantasy, and satiric invective. Some examples, closely related to other popular entertainments of the time, lack technical subtlety, making use of stereotypes and crude plots. Others however are works of imaginative and technical skill, with jesting allusion to classical precedents. Although many forms, especially parody, draw upon Continental examples, the Scottish examples across all genres are also enriched and made distinctive by their great verbal and situational invention.
The reception of Ovid in the literature of the Early Modern Czech Lands has not been satisfactorily investigated up to now. He was undoubtedly the favourite ancient poet after Virgil, his works were part of many libraries, were avidly studied at universities and at Latin schools. His poems served as an important source and model for the poetry of humanists from the Czech Lands. Motifs from his poetry, phrases or even entire verses can be found in poems of various content – in religious and occasional poetry, in moralizing poems or in panegyrics. The poem by Georg Bartholdus Pontanus, poet laureate and member of the high Catholic clergy, represents a type of Ovid reception which occurred rarely – being a parodic invective. The composition written in about 1580 at the monastery in Louka in Moravia and consisting of 166 dactylic hexameters is in all probability based on an actual event, a delict by an unnamed Catholic priest in Austria. In the first part of the poem, Pontanus describes the priest and his metamorphosis into a monster in the cave. In the second part, called “fiction”, all of Protestantism is depicted as a dangerous monster, which can bring mankind into ruins and bring about the victory of Satan. Pontanus plays with the basic idea of the Metamorphoses by Ovid that the transformation and the loss of human appearance is the punishment of gods/God. He uses entire parts from ancient poems mainly by Ovid, Virgil and Silius Italicus, depicting various mythological beings and creatures in a cave. The motif of a monster was common in contemporary confessional polemic, wherein the poem by Pontanus is particularly offensive in the attack against Protestantism. Because of that, it could not be printed at the time of its composition and remained as a manuscript work shared by a few similarly thinking intellectuals in the monastery of Louka.
Detective fiction as parodic reformulation of genre’s defining patterns has a long history in the Latin American tradition: Borges, Bioy Casares, Soriano, Levrero, Ibargüengoitia, etc. Besides, the evolution of Latin American detective genre has always been characterized by a progressive focalization in the social aspects over the detective story line which has served as a mask to depict in a critical way the flaws of the region’s societies and governments. In nowadays Cuba it could be highlighted the crime narrative of parodic slant by Lorenzo Lunar Cardedo. Among the major features of Lunar Cardedo’s style there are the marginal atmospheres, the stylization of popular speech, the intertextuality, the humor, the parody, and the social criticism. This article focuses on the parodic, intertextual and satiric aspects of his work, particularly discernible in the novel Proyecto en negro (2013), in which the author emphasizes – in opposition to the official discourse – the perpetuation of corrupt, chauvinist, racist, and homophobic behaviors in contemporary Cuba, while relaxing the genre formula limits in order to follow a much more irreverent path within the new Latin American detective fiction.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.