Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. A
funny little man with a derby hat and a bamboo
cane. He wore a jacket that was too small and
shoes that were too large. He used to walk a
splayfooted walk, all the while twirling his cane.
And he had a tiny little mustache which he used
to twitch back and forth when he was upset.
He was a funny little man. And the last time
I saw him, he was a pink-faced, white-haired
old man who kept patting my hand and saying,
"Keep warm. Keep warm." It doesn't seem
fair that the comedians should have to die,
just like everyone else.
Richard Nathan, Act V, Scene I: A Night in Elsinore
Literary parody uses humor, satire (parody usually is classified as a specie of Horatian satire) and/or irony (under whose aegis parody fell in ancient times) to make fun of a literary work by imitating it (or its subject, style or author). Such imitation is not necessarily at the expense of what's being parodied (really good parodies often are mistaken for the original). As D. J. Taylor noted in a recent Times of London article, parody can be recognized
as a gradual heightening of the original’s stylistic quirks to the point where [these collapse] into absurdity ... by variations such as pastiche (quasi-sympathetic imitation drawing attention to its own facility) and burlesque ... rarely malign, in which everything is so deviously mocked that the ur-text can sometimes be left far behind in the burlesquer’s slipstream....
Undoubtedly the most frequently and successfully parodied English-language author is Shakespeare. There are websites devoted to nothing but Shakespeare parodies, and a fair number of books have been published which focus on such parody, either by itself or as part of a larger overview of parody:

Eric Ormsby suggests that there's something snugly parasitic in [parody's] intimacy. The parodist must inhabit his victim's voice down to its least inflections—with close and lingering attention to those very flourishes an author is proudest of—only to turn the voice to ridiculous effect. The trick is to yoke the unmistakable manner to a grotesquely disproportionate subject.
Shakespeare aside, perhaps the longest-lived progenitor of English-language literary parody is the immortal first sentence of Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830). The subject of its own international competition since 1982, the latest prize-winning parody reads as follows:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.
A number of otherwise "serious" English-language authors have produced well-known parodies. Swift's immortal Gulliver's Travels, for example, is a parody of travellers' tales (as well as a satire on human nature). Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is essentially a parody of Gothic fiction:

What has proved to be arguably the most popular of all sustained English-language parodies, though (it eventually occupied three volumes), had nothing at all to do with Shakespeare, or dark and stormy nights, or the immortality of the elderly. Rather, it was penned as a reaction to an 18th century English aesthetic movement.
In 1768, an English artist, clergyman and schoolmaster named William Gilpin published a book, Essays on Prints, wherein he proposed that only picturesque views were worthy of the discerning traveller. Over the next two decades Gilpin travelled extensively, recording his thoughts about what he saw in terms of this focus on the picturesque. In 1782, these observations were published as Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770. In 1791, this was followed by his publication of Remarks on forest scenery, and other woodland views, (relative chiefly to picturesque beauty), illustrated by the scenes of New-Forest in Hampshire, in three books:

Gilpin's fashionable principles of correct travel were satirized as early as 1800 by Jane Austen in the title we've already noted above (though not published until 1817):
I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages — did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward. In the present instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.
Between 1809 and 1821, though, an extraordinarily popular three-volume parody of Gilpin and the picturesque was published that not only highlighted the work of one of history's greatest caricaturists, but also featured what is arguably the earliest popular cartoon character.
The author of these volumes was William Combe. The caricaturist was Thomas Rowlandson. And the immortal focus of their three volumes? Dr. Syntax....

A Bookseller may keep his carriage,
And ask ten thousand pounds in marriage;
May have his mansion in a square,
And build a house for countryair;
And yet 'tis odds the fellow knows
If Horace wrote in verse or prose.
Could Dr. Grey in chariot ride,
And take each day his wine beside,
If he did not contrive to cook,
Each year, his Tour into a book;
A flippant, flashy, flow'ry style,
A lazy morning to beguile;
With every other leaf, a print
Of some fine view in aqua tint' ?
Such is the book I mean to make
And I've no doubt the work will take:
For though your wisdom may decry it,
The simple folk will surely buy it....
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