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Admitting that satire is 'notoriously a slippery term', Elliott studies its development from primitive magic; he demonstrates that it has evolved from black magic to literary art. Elliott has mastered the freudian theory of wit, and his reading of Kris has led him to an interesting comparison between caricature and satire. Apart from its psychoanalytic and anthropological excursions into the nature and function of satire, the book is primarily concerned with a critical analysis of the Roman poets, Celtic bards, Shakespeare, Molière, Swift, and, more recently, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. Elliott notes: 'In the United States one of the most consistent cries of our troubled times is the cry for a great satirist: Why have we no Swift?'. Yet his discussion of twentieth century British satire fails to explain why the United States is less generously endowed in this area.
A nation that tamed Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, and failed to appreciate Nathanael West, is hardly crying for a Swift. We are probably too young and insecure as a cultural entity to have made the psychological transition from magic to satire, especially because our technological magic has been so successful. And, if there is an occasional cry for a Swift, there are louder and more frequent cries for the omnipotent magicians of science.
It seems that satire is unsuited to the media of mass communication and hence commercially unprofitable in the United States. It