ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that satire has been intertwined with world-building practices since its emergence as a creative modality in the Western canon. Although satire has been categorized as a genre over the course of centuries of literary theory, most contemporary accounts of satire argue that it functions across genres, inflecting many different forms of discourse and artistic practice. The satirical worldview therefore emerges primarily from a critical attitude toward the content to be represented, combined with rhetorical strategies and formal devices that elicit a comedic response. Beyond their explicit targets, most satires also focus on processes of mediation as their implicit object. The comedies of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes form the earliest surviving corpus of satirical work in the Western world. Aristophanes creates significantly more expansive satirical worlds in two of his plays: The Birds and The Frogs.
