First of all I want to explain the title of this post. As all of you know, The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera written by John Gay that satirizes Italian opera. So in my third post I'm going to talk about other literary works that emerged to satirize a specific literary genre or sub-genre, so in a way, they are rebel pieces.
The first work I'm going to deal with is The Rape of the Lock. As we have studied, this mock-epic narrative poem was written by Alexander Pope in order to parody the serious, elevated style of the classical epic poem–such as The Iliad or The Odyssey.
The second literary work is Gulliver's Travels, a novel written by Jonathan Swift. Although this novel has been treated as a children's story, it is in fact both a satire on human nature and a parody of the travellers' tales literary sub-genre.
The third work I'm going to deal with is The Tragedy of Tragedies or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, which is a play written by Henry Fielding that satirizes the absurdities of bad, and even good, English tragedies, like for example Hamlet.
The last literary work is a Spanish one. Don Quixote is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes that emerged to satirize the popular sub-genre of that time, the chivalric romance, a style of heroic prose and verse narrative work.
To conclude, I hope you enjoy this post and also I would like you to find it very useful and interesting. At least, I have learned a lot about "rebel" literary works.
