The Satiric Treatise in Eighteenth-Century Germany

In Germany during the 18th Century several prose satires were produced that resembled each other in their basic fiction: they all pretended to be sober disquisitions on matters of scholarly concern. The writers in each case achieved their satiric effect by perverting the various formal conventions expected of the learned author. This study examines the wide range of distortive techniques employed by the satirists Liscow, Rabener, Riedel and Hess (among others) in order to define the parameters and suggest the course of development of this unique genre.