ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the novelists who have done most to widen the range of narrative satire - and the greatest of them is Charles Dickens. The special quality of Dickens's satire can be partly explained by his extraordinary relationship with the English public. One of the few personal vices that Dickens treats satirically is hypocrisy, as in the splendid Tartuffe-like figures of Uriah Heep and Mr Pecksniff. Satire in the novel should not be confused with propaganda, of which prose fiction has been a powerful instrument. There are, however, several special traditions of the novel which have close affinities to satire and have provided fruitful media for novelists during the last three and a half centuries. Some of the finest satire of the twentieth century is to be found in James Joyce's Ulysses. Ulysses is also a version of the most famous type of literary travesty, the 'mock-heroic'.
