ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how aspects of the tradition of menippean satire, with its links to fantastic, in particular its tropes of obscene, grotesque, and carnivalesque, reveal themselves in Lud-in-the-Mist. It argues that by writing Lud-in-the-Mist as a menippea, Hope Mirrlees is able to don an authorial mask, casting herself as fairy, that is, as heretic and blasphemer, in conflict with the cultural, social, and sexual norms she encountered in her own contemporary moment. Mirrlees uses the novel to express many of the real-life carnivalesque aspects of her intimate, eighteen-year relationship with her mentor and companion, Cambridge Classicist and public intellectual, Jane Ellen Harrison. The chapter then traces menippean current in the novel not only to Mirrlees's friendship and collaboration with Russian folklorist and satirist, Alexei Remizov and his wife Serafima Dovgello, while she composed the novel in 1924, but also to Harrison, whose long-standing interests in Russian folklore, leftist politics, and theoretical positions on heresy were shared by Hope Mirrlees.
