Heine’s poem ‘Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen’ (‘The night is still, the streets are dumb’), written in the early 1820s, describes a nocturnal encounter between the poet and his double. The poet returns to stand under the window of the house where his beloved once lived, only to find his double on duty in his place. To the poet, the double’s sighs and hand-wringing seem to be a mocking...

(NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongsid...

Introduction to “Parody, Irony and Satire: Literary Approaches Rewriting Subverting Reality”