According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5), Hegemon of Thasos was the inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording in well-known poems he transformed the sublime into the ridiculous. In ancient See more

In classical music, as a technical term, parody refers to a reworking of one kind of composition into another (for example, a motet into … See more

Since the 20th century, parody has been heightened as the central and most representative artistic device, the catalysing agent of artistic creation and innovation. This … See more

Some genre theorists, following Bakhtin, see parody as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre; this idea has proven especially fruitful for genre film theorists. Such theorists note that Western movies, for example, after the classic stage defined the … See more

The first usage of the word parody in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Ben Jonson, in Every Man in His Humour in 1598: "A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was." The next citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who also … See more

Sometimes the reputation of a parody outlasts the reputation of what is being parodied. For example, Don Quixote, which mocks the traditional knight errant tales, is much better known … See more

Kenneth Baker considered poetic parody to take five main forms.
1. The first was to use parody to attack the author parodied, as in J K Stephen's mimicry of Wordsworth, “Two voices are there: one is of the deep....And one is of an old half-witted … See more