Travesty (literature)

Travesty is a comical or satirical literary genre, commonly a poetry, in which the plot of a well-known myth or a serious literary work in retold in a comical form.^[1][2][3][4] The genre overlaps with parody, but differs from the latter in that a travesty follows the plot of the original, but the style is different, while a parody follows the style, but not necessarily the plot.^[5][2][6] Also, a travesty serves primarily for an amusement of the reader, while a parody is often a literary weapon.^[4]

Etymology

Paul Scarron's title "Virgile travesti" gave rise to the English term for the genre.^[1] The French verb travestir means "to change the dress", "to disguise"; it also gave rise to other meanings of the word "travesty".

Examples

Examples are multiple travesties of Virgil,^[6] such as Giovanni Battista Lalli's L'Eneide travestita (1634), Paul Scarron's "Virgile travesti" (1648–52)^[1] and Aloys Blumauer's "Virgil's Aeneid" (1783). In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–96), the humorous retelling of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend may be considered as an early example of the genre.^[1]

In 1791 the Russian poet N. P. Osipov published Aeneid Turned Inside Out [ru] (Russian: Виргилиева Энеида, вывороченная наизнанку, lit. 'Vergil's Aeneid, turned inside out'). Ivan Kotliarevsky's mock-epic poem Eneida (Ukrainian: Енеїда), written in 1798, is considered to be the first literary work published wholly in the modern Ukrainian language. The Belarusian-language travesty, Aeneid Inside Out [be] was written in the first half of the 19th century and attributed either to Vikentsiy Ravinski [be] (Wincenty Rowiński) or to Ihnat Mankowsky [be].

See also

• Burlesque
• Mock-heroic
• Paraphrase