Terry Eagleton points out in his book Ideology : An Introduction that the word “ideology ” has been used to mean very different things. According to Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature, the term “ideology ” was coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy as a philosophical concept to refer to the “science” of the study of ideas. From this initial sense, the term evolved to possibly signify one of the following three things:

Eagleton also acknowledges these varied uses of the term, and critiques the advantages and disadvantages of each. For example, Eagleton points out that meaning (iii) is of little value because it broadens the notion of ideology to include almost everything, thereby severely limiting its utility. Similarly, Eagleton points out that defining ideology as a system of illusory beliefs [definition (ii)], or the idea of false consciousness ) implies that ideology is associated exclusively with the notion of the powerful or dominant group. This is not always the case, and such a definition would eliminate the association of ideology with particular groups who are not dominant, such as feminists or Marxists (Eagleton, 6). This leaves us with definition (i), ideology as a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group. Martin Seliger approaches ideology in this manner, calling it “sets of ideas by which men [sic] posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social action and specifically political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot, or rebuild a given social order” (cited in Eagleton, 6). However, Eagleton also finds fault with this definition because it eliminates from ideology some of its key elements. Eagleton identifies six important strategies associated with most ideological discourse: the promotion of beliefs congenial to a dominant power ; naturalization of beliefs to make them self-evident; universalization of dominant beliefs ; denigration of ideas that challenge the dominant power ’s beliefs ; exclusion of rival forms of thought, and obscuring social reality in ways that prove convenient to the dominant power (5). If definition (i) is accepted, strategies key to understanding the notion of ideology would be lost. Consequently, Eagleton argues for the simultaneous acceptance of all three definitions, allowing the contradictions between them to simply coexist, rather than risk losing key elements associated with the concept.

That being said, in this volume ideology will be understood to generally refer to the system of beliefs that characterize a certain group, with the knowledge that when this group is dominant, ideology may involve false consciousness and all the strategies of ideological inculcation delineated by Eagleton in his study.

The term “parody,” as ideology , has been defined in many different ways, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The three major and most widely cited theorists of parody are Gérard Genette in Palimpsests (1982), Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody (1985), and Margaret A. Rose in Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (1993). Genette elaborates an extensive and complex theory of what he terms “transtextuality ” defined as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (1). He then defines five types of transtextuality : intertextuality , paratextuality , metatextuality , architextuality and hypertextuality . The larger part of his book is dedicated to the concept of “hypertextuality ,” which Genette defines as any relationship between a text (“hypertext ”) and a prior text (“hypotext ”) upon which it is based in a manner other than commentary. The second text either transforms the previous text by repeating its words, actions, or characters in a new context, or imitates its basic thematic and stylistic characteristics without “necessarily speaking about it or citing it” (Genette, 5). The concept of parody falls under hypertextuality for Genette, and he specifically limits the term “parody” to a playful transformation of a hypotext by its hypertext . He defines all hypertextual relationships in terms of their “mood” and their relation, so that once a text imitates (instead of transforming) another text, it becomes pastiche , caricature , or forgery instead of parody; once one text transforms another in a satirical or serious way, it is no longer parody but either travesty (satirical) or transposition (serious).

In contrast, for Linda Hutcheon , all parody must contain an element of irony . Hutcheon defines parody as “a form of imitation , but imitation characterized by ironic inversion” (Hutcheon , A Theory of Parody, 6). Although Hutcheon refers to parody as an imitation (in contrast to Genette, who terms it a transformation ), she emphasizes that “the kind of parody upon which I wish to focus is an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, inverting, and ‘trans-contextualizing’ previous works of art” (11). The concept of “trans-contextualization” is, in effect, similar to Genette’s idea of textual “transformation .” Thus, the two principal differences between the concepts of parody for these two major critics are that: (a) parodic transformation is only a variety of parody for Hutcheon , whereas it is the very definition of parody for Genette; and (b) parody must be playful in mood for Genette, whereas it must be ironic in nature for Hutcheon .

Finally, Margaret A. Rose offers a detailed evolution of the concept of parody from ancient times to the postmodern era. The section of Rose’s work that is relevant for this study is her definition of contemporary parody. According to Rose, the essential difference between ancient and modern parody is that parody in ancient times was seen as both metafictional and comic , whereas in modern times parody is not simultaneously seen as both, but simply as either one or the other. Rose states that “late-modern theories of parody from the 1960s and after have tended to emphasise either the powerlessness or the nihilistic character of its comic factors, or its meta-fictional or intertextual aspects, but not both the comic as something positive and the meta-fictional or the intertextual at the same time” (272). For Rose, this combination of the comic and the meta-textual is what defines postmodern parody.

Each critic defines the mood of parody differently—as playful, ironic, or comic . Similarly, each views the function of parody in a distinct manner—as transformation , imitation , or meta-textual commentary. Moreover, each of the critics whose essays appear in this volume has used a different definition of parody. Consequently, rather than offering an over-arching definition of par...