[2] Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque,[3] a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture,[3] a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view.
[7] The Menippean tradition is also evident in Petronius' Satyricon, especially in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis", which combines epic form, tragedy, and philosophy with verse and prose.
This was the epoch of the decline of national legend, the disintegration of associated ethical norms, and the concomitant explosion of new religious and philosophical schools vying with each other over "ultimate questions".
Bakhtin argues that the generic integrity of Menippean satire in its expression of a decentred reality is a quality that has enabled it to exercise an immense influence over the development of European novelistic prose.
[16] According to Bakhtin, the cultural force that underpins the integrity and unity of Menippean satire as a genre, despite its extreme variability and the heterogeneity of its elements, is carnival.
The genre epitomises the transposition of the "carnival sense of the world" into the language and forms of literature, a process Bakhtin refers to as Carnivalisation.
The form was revived during the Renaissance by Erasmus, Burton, and Laurence Sterne,[19] while 19th-century examples include the John Buncle of Thomas Amory and The Doctor of Robert Southey.
[3] Among the works that contemporary scholars have identified as growing out of the Menippean tradition are: According to P. Adams Sitney in "Visionary Film", Mennipea became the dominant new genre in avant-garde cinema at the turn of the century.
[citation needed] Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer, etc.