Burlesque

Burlesque is a kind of comic literature based on a sharp incongruity between a subject and the style of its presentation: either a dignified, high subject is depicted in deliberately coarse, lowered language or, conversely, a trivial, everyday phenomenon is presented in a grandiloquent, "high" style. It is this stylistic incongruity that generates the comic effect. Burlesque is closely linked to travesty and parody and was widespread in European and Ukrainian literature of the 17th–18th centuries. In Ukrainian letters the burlesque-travesty tradition was vividly embodied in Ivan Kotliarevsky's "Aeneid," becoming a bridge to a new national literature built on the living folk language. Burlesque played an important role in the democratisation of literature, its rapprochement with folk life and language, and in the loosening of the outdated canons of "high" letters.