Menippean Satire - Terminology

Terminology

The form is named after the Greek cynic parodist and polemicist Menippus (3rd century BCE). His works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian and Marcus Terentius Varro; such satires are sometimes also termed Varronian satire. M. H. Abrams classifies Menippean satire as one form of indirect satire, the category opposed to the formal satire of direct criticism in the first person.

Paul Salzman, taking Menippean satire as a genre as "rather ill-defined", describes it as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative and satirical commentary. Northrop Frye found the term "cumbersome and in modern terms rather misleading", and proposed as replacement the term 'anatomy' (taken from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy). In his theory of prose fiction it occupies the fourth place with the novel, romance and confession.