Menippean Satire is a term employed broadly to refer to satires that are rhapsodic in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative. The form is named after Menippus and suppositions about the nature of his (lost) works. The term has been used by Classical grammarians and by philologists to refer to satires, usually in prose, that move rapidly between styles and points of view. Contemporary literary scholars have attempted to classify works such as Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Thomas Carlysle's Sartor Resartus as Menippean satires.
