The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

out, by means of subversive mimicry, any
weakness, pretension or lack of selfawareness
in its original. This ‘original’
may be another work, or the collective
style of a group of writers, but although
parody is often talked of as a very clever
and inbred literary joke, any distinctive
and artful use of language – by, for example,
journalists, politicians or priests – is
susceptible of parodic impersonation.
Although it is often deflationary and
comic, its distinguishing characteristic is
not deflation, but analytic mimicry. The
systematic appropriation of the form and
imagery of secular love poetry by the
sacred lyric is an example of parody in
this basic sense. It is one of the ways for
a writer to explore and identify available
techniques, and may focus on their
unused potentialities as well as their limitations.
As an internal check that literature
keeps on itself, parody may be
considered parasitic or creative, and is
often both. Perhaps because parodic
works are themselves highly critical, they
are more frequently annotated than
analysed; sometimes parodists are so selfconscious
that they pre-empt their wouldbe
critic, providing their own footnotes
and explanatory comments (like Vladimir
Nabokov in Pale Fire, 1962). The parodist
addresses a highly ‘knowing’ and literate
audience, for whom criticism is merely a
part of literature, not a separate industry.
The parodist is often an ironist, affecting
admiration of the style borrowed and distorted
(Pope ‘compliments’ Milton in this
way in The Dunciad, 1728); sometimes
explicitly and systematically undermining
a rival mode (as Jane Austen does with
the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey,
1818); impersonation of the alien style is
always the basic technique. In various
periods, particularly in the eighteenth
century, attempts were made to
distinguish different kinds of parodic
Pastiche 167
appropriation: ‘burlesque’ was said to be
the kind where some new ‘low’ subject
was treated incongruously in an old ‘high’
style, and ‘travesty’ the opposite (with
Juno using the language of a fishwife).
Such distinctions can seldom in practice
be sustained, since one parodic work habitually
exploits a whole range of incongruous
juxtapositions, and the categories
obscure the complex intermingling of parodic
effects. Both terms, however, are useful
to indicate the kind of response a work
appeals to: ‘travesty’ (as in its popular use)
implies something savagely reductive, and
‘burlesque’ the comic immediacy of a theatrical
‘spoof’. A distinction can be made,
however, between all forms of parodic
imitation and ‘caricature’: the analogy
between caricature in painting and parody
in writing (established by Fielding in his
parodic novel Joseph Andrews, 1742) is
misleading. Parody attacks its butt indirectly,
through style; it ‘quotes’ from and
alludes to its original, abridging and
inverting its characteristic devices. The
caricaturist’s ‘original’ is not some other
already existent style or work, whereas
parody is a mirror of a mirror, a critique of
a view of life already articulated in art.
Parody is so common an element in literature
precisely because it adds this extra
level of critical comment which is lacking
from caricature. See also PASTICHE, SATIRE.
See S. Dentith, Parody (2000); Linda
Hutcheon, Theory of Parody (2000).
LS
Pastiche Whether applied to part of
a work, or to the whole, implies that it
is made up largely of phrases, motifs,
images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or
less unchanged from the work(s) of other
author(s). The term is often used in a
loosely derogatory way to describe the
kind of helpless borrowing that makes an
immature or unoriginal work read like