This paper explores some of the difficulties involved in defining satire.Neither the formal characteristics of satire nor its informing purposes, including its variable associations with humour and the provocation of amusement allow for a unifying definition over the long term. It considers a range of approaches to and types of definition and takes as a principle example the notion of Menippean satire. It argues that a characterisation in terms of family resemblance is more helpful for a strictly historical understanding than formal definitions and that it is misleading to take satire as a genre, let along a literary one. Throughout it also suggests that the case of satire tells us something about definition and the often naïve expectations of what definitions can establish.

Conal Condren offers a radical reappraisal of the character of moral and political theory in early modern England through an exploration of pervasive arguments about office. In this context he explores the significance of oath-taking and three of the major crises around oaths and offices in the seventeenth century. This fresh focus on office brings into serious question much of what has been taken for granted in the study of early modern political and moral theory concerning, for example, the interplay of ideologies, the emergence of a public sphere, of liberalism, reason of state, de facto theory, and perhaps even political theory and moral agency as we know it. Argument and Authority is a major new work from a senior scholar of early modern political thought, of interest to a wide range of historians, philosophers and literary scholars.

Introductions to fields of studies are almost a sub-genre in their own right, but are often resistant to direct comparison. The essay discusses four recent introductions to humour published by university presses, and what more broadly they may signify about disciplinary advertisement and consolidation. It emphasises a range of difficulties endemic to the study of humour arising from its interdisciplinarity, recent establishment, the variable range of humour and its putative universality; in which context it pays attention to Austinian performatives, puns and their translation, and to the shared propensity in these introductions to mythologise the history of humour theory. Most critical attention is paid to the studies that form almost polar opposites: Nilsen & Nilsen, The Language of Humour and Attardo, The Linguistics of Humour.

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