The significance and limitations of Juvenalian and Horatian satire in the Romantic period are clear; now we will examine texts that attempted to transcend the inadequacies of these modes, often by appropriating each of them. This third category includes several of the satires from the era that are most often read today and have received critical attention, works like Shelley's Peter Bell the Third (1819) and Byron's The Vision of Judgment(1822). The satires in this class take a radical stance on immediate political issues: they support such changes as parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, repeal of the Corn Laws, and liberalization of Britain's rule over Ireland.

What I am calling Radical satire draws on the tradition that Mikhail Bakhtin has analyzed as the “carnivalesque,” a variety of literary motifs and procedures with ties to such extraliterary practices as the festivals of medieval Europe: parodic representations, inversions of hierarchy, a rhetorical celebration of disorder, and – crucially for our subject – the juxtaposition of different narrative “voices” and different subgenres.