ABSTRACT
Critics who emphasize the "moral" element in a satirist's work tend to ignore the fact that "morality" is a significant characteristic of almost every literary form. Almost all adventure and conflict fiction expresses, in the terms of its own culture's morality, the struggle between "right" and "wrong", and almost always permits "right" to win. It has frequently been pointed out by skeptical critics that many satirists who proclaimed morality as their satiric motivation were not themselves especially moral. Frances Russell believes that the real stimulus of the satirist is his temperament, not his morality. The satirist is very much aware of the problem of relative morality: that what is right in one society is wrong in another; what is correct in a society at one time is wrong in the same society at another time.
