Smollett, Tobias (George) - Daniel Punday (essay date 1994)
Daniel Punday (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot Greaves," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 2, January 1994, pp. 169-88.
[In the following essay, Punday refutes the prevailing view that Sir Launcelot Greaves is a failure as a satire. He asserts instead that in this novel, Smollett deliberatelyly manipulated the romantic literary conventions of his time with satiric intent, and that this would have been recognized by his contemporary readership.]
Tobias Smollett is best known for his picaresque social satires, such as Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker. Critics have generally considered Sir Launcelot Greaves a failed experiment, an unhappy mixture of his characteristic mode with chivalric romance conventions.1 Although Smollett seems to use his hero as a satiric mouthpiece whose exemplary nature implicitly criticizes...
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