Parody: One of the Western world’s favourite forms of humour. Examples can be found almost anywhere—from TV to the internet, and have become even more ubiquitous with the rise of social media platforms like Youtube. In this section I will do a very brief description of what exactly parody is, and how it is commonly used. I’ll keep it relatively short and sweet, but I’ve got full citations of three texts on parody theory in the References section which I would highly recommend checking out if you want more detailed information on this area of study.  

Simon Dentith provides a very good, inclusive description of what parody is in general. He says “that parody is one of the many forms of intertextual allusion out of which texts are produced,” and that “the spectrum would include imitation, pastiche, mock-heroic, burlesque, travesty, spoof, and parody itself.” With this wide of a description, it seems like parody is a hard thing to pin down, but overall, it would seem that it is any sort of intertextual reference, often done to a comedic end (an aspect Dentith brings up later in his book Parody).

It’s also important to note the differences between satire and parody, since the division between them is often blurry. I am approaching the idea of parody as different from satire based on the fact that parody requires a referent—usually a textual or film based source—, whereas satire does not. Parody will often take the form or characters from another source, and insert something different into it, whereas satire requires no predetermined referential form in order to function.

Parodies can be in almost any medium—from print to video to text—and is done for all types of audiences, from all types of sources. The forms of parody have shifted quite a bit over time, as Margaret A. Rose shows in her text on Parody from the Ancient world to the Post-Modern, but they have always had one key thing in common: a reference to another work. This makes identifying parodies easy, even in all of the various forms (such as the numerous ones previously quoted from Dentith), because they will all be some form of perversion of another work.

This is the basic definition of parody which I will be working from in the rest of this project, though there may be many other ways of thinking about parody.

Parody is commonly used to poke fun at a previous work, mainly through a perversion or inversion of the expected representation. What this means is that something originally innocent will be parodied in either a hyperbolically innocent way, or made very explicit, whereas the opposite will be true of something originally explicit. The way in which this is done plays on the expectations of the viewer resulting in a (generally) humorous reaction.

Throughout the rest of the sections on this site I will begin to hone in on ways in which children’s stories are used for parody—often for an adult audience—eventually focusing on specific examples of Alice in Wonderland parodies found in RBSC.

Go ahead and click through to the Parody of Children’s Stories section to continue reading more.

 

 

References: 

Dentith, Simon, and MyiLibrary. Parody. New York; London: Routledge, 2000

Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. 3; 3. Vol. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

—Parody/meta-Fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction. London: Croom Helm, 1979.