Travesty is a comical or satirical literary genre, commonly a poetry, in which the plot of a well-known myth or a serious literary work is retold in a comical form.travesty, BritannicaTheodor Verweyen, Gunther Witting, "Travestie". In: Klaus Weimar et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2007, vol. 3, , p. 684Gero von Wilpert, "Travestie", In: Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (Kröners Taschenausgabe. Vol. 231). 4., Kröner, Stuttgart, 1964, p. 738. The genre overlaps with parody, but differs from the latter in that a travesty follows the plot of the original, but the style is different, while a parody follows the style, but not necessarily the plot.August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst, 1802-1803 Also, a travesty serves primarily for an amusement of the reader, while a parody is often a literary weapon.
Etymology Paul Scarron's title "Virgile travesti" gave rise to the English term for the genre. The French verb travestir means "to change the dress", "to disguise"; it also gave rise to other meanings of the word "travesty".
Examples
Examples are multiple travesties of Virgil,Susanna Braund, Travesty: The Ultimate Domestication of Epic, 1 June 2019 such as Giovanni Battista Lalli's L'Eneide travestita (1634), Paul Scarron's "Virgile travesti" (1648–52) and Aloys Blumauer's "Virgil's Aeneid" (1783). In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–96), the humorous retelling of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend may be considered as an early example of the genre.
In 1791 the Russian poet N. P. Osipov published (). Ivan Kotliarevsky's mock-epic poem Eneida (Ukrainian: Енеїда), written in 1798, is considered to be the first literary work published wholly in the modern Ukrainian language. The Belarusian-language travesty, was written in the first half of the 19th century and attributed either to (Wincenty Rowiński) or to .
See also Burlesque Mock-heroic Paraphrase
References
External links Definitions in dictionaries of the Swedish Academy