Travesty

Travesty is a comic device and generic variety in which a high, dignified content is retold in a deliberately lowered, everyday, plain style, and heroic personages appear in an ordinary, comic guise. The name derives from the Italian for "to disguise": travesty, as it were, "re-dresses" an elevated plot in folk clothing. The classic example of Ukrainian travesty is Ivan Kotliarevsky's "Aeneid," in which Virgil's ancient epic is retold in the language and everyday life of the Ukrainian Cossacks, which became the beginning of modern Ukrainian literature. Unlike parody, which mocks a concrete work, travesty lowers the high style or plot itself. Travesty is closely linked to burlesque and is an important phenomenon of comic literature and of the history of Ukrainian letters in the age of its formation.