The word "parody" derives from the Greek meaning "to sing beside." In ancient Greek theater the main points of a play were reiterated, or re-sung, for dramatic and theatrical emphases. After a point was presented, it would be repeated by a chorus in the play. This repetition was called parados. Today parody has a different meaning: An imitation that criticizes the original.

Parody is an act of homage as well as intuitive literary criticism. As the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote, one can parody only a work one likes; otherwise, the work will seem like a better parody than anything one could oneself hope to devise.

Below are selected images and captions from the exhibition mounted in Fenwick Library on the second floor, Wing A. (Please place cursor over each image and left mouseclick to view larger version of the image).

Many authors use parodies in their works. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) parodied John Lily's (1554?-1606) Euphues as well as the work of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Henry Fielding's (1707-1754) early novel Shamela is an imitation-parody of Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Pamela, and, as far as I know, is the first book to parody a whole other book.

To justify publication of an entire volume making fun of another volume, the original has to be a great success. One of the first modern examples is Sinclair Lewis' (1885-1951) best-selling Main Street pilloried here by Carolyn Wells' (1862-1942) Ptomaine Street. As in other examples, the publishers of the parody have imitated the binding and appearance of the original.

Allen Ginsberg's (1926-1997) Howl, the major poem of the beat generation, inspired this collection of parodies called Growl. Like Donald Ogden Stewart's Parody Outline of History, Growl is an anthology of parodies of contemporary writing, this time of the beats such as Gregory Corso (1930-2001) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919).

The academy has been a rich source of parody material. Here is a Norton Anthology of Poetry together with a volume of parodies presented in mock-similar form, with a sidelong glance at T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton." The editor, William Zaranka (b. 1944), also contributed many of the parodies in the book.