ABSTRACT
This chapter locates Howard as a major part of Irish writing's satirical tradition in both the Irish and the English languages. It examines the three modes of satire: Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean, and it explains the differences between them. It also traces some highpoints of the Irish satirical tradition and its sociocultural importance. It also looks at his place as a writer of popular culture and how the materiality and writing in his books deconstruct this division. It reads his work in the light of Bourdieu's notions of popular and high culture and Derrida's concepts of the ergon and the parergon, namely the work and the frame enclosing that work.
