Risultati Editore "Naxos AudioBooks" in Satira

A soldier in the First World War who never actually sees any combat, Josef Svejk is the awkward protagonist - and none of the other characters can quite decide whether his bumbling efforts to get to the front are genuine or not. Often portrayed as one of the first anti-war novels, Hasek's classic satire is a tour-de-force of modernist writing, influencing later writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Joseph Heller.

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. On the other end of the line is the brilliant yet temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of a saccharine love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his family is in danger in Vienna, while his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded by his British colleagues.

Born in 1623 as the youngest child of a wealthy Essex family, Margaret Cavendish became a Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria before going on to marry the widowed William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. She was a prolific writer whose work encompassed a range of genres. The Blazing World is part fiction and part feminist text in which a lady is shipwrecked and seeks to ensure that the Blazing World in which she finds herself is transformed into a Utopia - free of war, sexual discrimination, and religious discord.

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

Tobias Smollett, in his creation of the Scot Roderick Random, exposes the sheer incompetence and injustice of the Royal Navy, as well as the snobbery and hypocrisy prevalent in English middle-class society at the time. Set in the mid-18th century, this picaresque novel follows the life and adventures of Roderick, the eponymous hero who has been shunned by his gentleman father's family on the basis of the lowliness of his mother's family.

The Roman poet Juvenal was the greatest satirist of Imperial Rome. His 16 satires encompass attacks on the immorality, abuses and hypocrisy of the Romans of his day. The last of the great Roman poets, he wrote between CE 110 and 130, his approach to satire coming close to modern expectations of the genre.

Rose Macaulay was a fascinating and influential British writer, known for her wit and intellect. First published in 1920, Potterism is a powerful satire about the Potter newspaper empire, and the ways in which journalists struggled during the First World War and the 1920s to balance the truth and what would sell. While Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their father’s popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the family business. But Jane is greedy and wants more than society will let her have.

The first of Kafka’s three great novels, The Man Who Disappeared (America) follows the picaresque adventures of Karl Rossman, who is banished to America following a family scandal. Upon his arrival, Karl immediately happens upon his uncle, and from there follows a pattern of wandering, adoption and expulsion as Karl marches inexorably on towards the interior of the continent. With its blitheness and comical moments, The Man Who Disappeared is perhaps the most charming of Kafka’s works.

A blistering rebuke of religious hypocrisy, Elmer Gantry is the story of a charismatic and manipulative social climber who rises to power within his church, despite his insincerity. Though he preaches against immorality and temptation, Reverend Dr Elmer Gantry can’t seem to give up his own vices, and he leaves a trail of broken people behind him in his pursuit of pleasure and power, betraying anybody and doing anything to get ahead.