spoof = 'literary imitation'

Jeff Prucher jprucher at YAHOO.COM
Thu Jan 30 23:26:30 UTC 2014


---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>Subject:      spoof = 'literary imitation'
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>>From a blog, 2011:
>
>
>"According to Russian literary historian D. S. Mirsky, Tolstoy's story 'The
>Prisoner of the Caucasus' was a kind of spoof on a Byronic poem of the same
>name, written by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1822."
>
>OK, the blogger understands that Pushkin's poem is lushly Romantic and
>Tolstoy's story, written fifty years later, is sober and realistic.
>Undoubtedly Tolstoy's choice of title suggests that *his* tale is a kind of
>contrastive commentary on Pushkin. The plots   are quite similar.
>
>But it is neither a parody nor a send-up nor a burlesque nor a counterfeit
>nor anything else that I associate with a "spoof."


I believe the word the writer was looking for was "deconstruction."
Jeff

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