title: Parody : The Art That Plays With Art
author:  Robert Chambers 
description: <i><b>Reviewed by Simon Dentith, University of Reading</b></i><br /><br />Parody, Robert Chambers reminds us in this approachable, eccentric, self-deprecating, and mildly megalomaniac book, is one of the few literary terms that come down to us from ancient Greece, where it means something like beside-or-against song, Certainly Chambers has taken the license of its antiquity to extend the scope of parody way beyond what most people have taken it to mean up to this point. It is not to be confined to the minor and disreputable genre beloved of nineteenth-century littrateurs and the New Statesman/New Yorker. This is because it is not to be confined to a genre at all, since it is in fact a pervasive technique characteristic of all literary periods, possibly even of all language use, which works to combine or play off one convention or set of conventions against another. Its scope is therefore very wide indeed, encompassing childrens mimicry, all of the traditionally designated parodic genres (so: mock-epic, comic epic, burlesque, travesty, spoof, lampoon and hoax - though its not itself a genre), word-play and puns, much of the history of the novel, skaz, film adaptations, imitations, Dada, self-reflexive art, and what we know as modernism and postmodernism. Parody is characteristically multistable, that is, it permits or encourages several perspectives simultaneously, thus challenging the linearity of Western thought in favour of the Yin and Yang of Daoism; it is the principal means by which genres get exploded and new genres develop; and its pervasiveness has only been overlooked by criticism since the Romantics because of extraordinary critical myopia (not to say stupidity. Chambers undertakes to remedy this myopia, more perhaps in hope than expectation, and does so with wit, wild erudition, much repetition, and lots of diagrams.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ![Cover](images/cover.png)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  <img src="images/logo-feedbooks-tiny.png" alt=
  
  
  "Feedbooks" title="Feedbooks" />
  
  
  # The King in Yellow
  
  
  ## Robert William Chambers
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  **Published:** 1895  
  
  
  **Categorie(s):** Fiction, Horror, Short Stories  
  
  
  **Source:** http://gutenberg.org
  
  
  
  
  
  **About Chambers:**  
  
  
  Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933) was
  
  
  an American artist and writer. He was born in Brooklyn, New York,
  
  
  to William P. Chambers (1827 - 1911), a famous lawyer, and Caroline
  
  
  Chambers (née Boughton), a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the
  
  
  founder of Providence, Rhode Island. Robert's brother was Walter
  
  
  Boughton Chambers, the world famous architect. Robert was first
  
  
  educated at the the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered
  
  
  the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the
  
  
  artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied
  
  
  at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris fr