The role of satire in poetics: the spanish treatises of the 19th century

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the satirical genre and its connections with Poetics in the Spanish Poetry and Rhetoric precept treatises of the nineteenth century. Throughout that century, literary theory was subject to major changes, such as the success of Hegel’s postulates on literary genres. Satire faces these changes and its own evolution: it was first identified with the Roman satura and afterwards through its various forms, it became a mixed or transitional genre. Its fragile nature seems to confront directly the normative perpetuity of treatises that, in spite of their rupture with romanticism, may be considered inheritors of the classicist principles.