Hello, next year on the LRB's Close Readings podcast, there'll be three new series running monthly from January to the end of the year.

Over the next three days, we'll be introducing each of them, starting today with Colin Burrow and Claire Bucknell, introducing their series on satire.

Hello and welcome to this series of Close Readings podcast from the London Review of Books on the subject of satire.

I'm Claire Bucknell, a fellow in English at All Souls College, Oxford, and a contributor to the LRB.

And for the next 12 episodes in our series, I'll be joined by Colin Burrow, also a fellow of All Souls and a contributor to the paper.

Hello, Claire. Lovely to be here. Lovely to be here too. Our series will take you from

the early 16th century all the way down to the mid-20th, focusing on 12 of the most important

and interesting literary satires or groups of satires written in English during that time.

In the early modern period, we'll move seamlessly from a prose satire by Erasmus in Latin,

the praise of folly.

We'll be talking about a translation though, won't we?

We won't be talking in Latin?

Yes, I've been persuaded that we ought to talk about translation.

It was a hard argument to win, but I won.

Then to John Dunn's hot-headed verse satires, to Ben Johnson's drama Volpony, and then

the Earl of Rochester's Filthiest Lampoons.

They really are very, very naughty, and we should warn people of that fact, shouldn't we, Claire?

Get ready.

Yeah.

In the 18th century, we'll begin with a comic drama, John Gaze the Beggar's Opera, before coming to Alexander Pope's The Dunciad and Lawrence Stern's giant unruly novel, Tristram Shandy. And the Dunciad's pretty unruly as well. That's too much. Unrulyness is going to be a kind of theme, isn't it, really? Yes, controlled unrulyness will be our keynote.

Are you suggesting I'm being too unruly?

Then there'll be an episode on Jane Austen's Emma and one on Byron's satiric epic poem, another unruly thing, Don Jewin.

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