Author: Louise Lee Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 1137578823 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear,George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone,Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke — both on the page and the stage — while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004336613 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past’s invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers – including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful – producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of ‘canonical’ neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at – the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
Author: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351790528 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 395
Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: "Comedy" and "humour" are not words most associate with the Victorian period, yet their culture was rife with laughter and irony. The 12 essays in this volume reanimate this "comic spirit" by exploring the humour in its social context. While previous studies of humour in the period focus on the age's own ongoing interest in the old distinction in comic theory between wit and humour, this volume aims to show how inadequate this distinction is in accounting for the many types of Victorian comic representation. The essays turn from linguistic or psychological analyses of humour towards the social production of humour and the cultural dynamics which underlie it.
Author: Michael Billig Publisher: SAGE ISBN: 9781412911436 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
From Thomas Hobbes' fear of the power of laughter to the compulsory, packaged "fun" of the contemporary mass media, Billig takes the reader on a stimulating tour of the strange world of humour. Both a significant work of scholarship and a novel contribution to the understanding of the humourous, this is a seriously engaging book' - David Inglis, University of Aberdeen This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good. In developing a critique of humour the author proposes a social theory that places humour - in the form of ridicule - as central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning. Historically, theories of humour reflect wider visions of politics, morality and aesthetics. For example, Bergson argued that humour contains an element of cruelty while Freud suggested that we deceive ourselves about the true nature of our laughter. Billig discusses these and other theories, while using the topic of humour to throw light on the perennial social problems of regulation, control and emancipation.
Author: Jerome K. Jerome Publisher: Graphic Arts Books ISBN: 1513279025 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 139
Book Description
A decade after their wild boat ride adventure on the Thames river, J, Harris, and George reunite for another vacation. Older, richer, and fatter, but not wiser, the three men stumble through mishaps and surprises as they journey to Germany. First saying their goodbyes, J and Harris seek the approval of their wives, worried about leaving their kids. Their wives are supportive, secretly considering their husbands’ trip from home as a vacation for themselves as well. Still a bachelor, George tells his aunt about the trip before they depart. First arriving in a boat, the men journey through Germany, stopping in Hamburg, Hanover, and Berlin. When they are able, they stay in hotels and inns, and when they are desperate, the sleep in the barns of kind farmers. After a long journey, the men finally arrive at their destination. Planning on completing a cycling tour through the German Black Forest, the men take a single rider and a tandem bicycle, making a solemn compromise to take turns being the solo rider. As they set out on their bike ride, the friends are amazed by the beauty and serenity of the forest, until they start to realize that everything looks familiar. Lost in the woods and going in circles, the three men must find a way home from their adventure before they get caught in the impending rain storm. Through sketches and detailed observations, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel provides a fascinating perspective on the landscape and culture of 20th century Germany. With drunken adventures, sword fights, and misfortunate weather, Three Men on the Bummel is an exciting and charming travelogue, humorous and enjoyable even for modern audiences. This edition of Three Men on the Bumel by Jerome K. Jerome is presented in an easy-to-read font and features an eye-catching new cover design. With these accommodations, this edition is accessible and appealing to contemporary audiences, restoring Jerome K Jerome’s work to modern standards while preserving the original wit and charm of Three Men on the Bummel.
Author: Vic Gatrell Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0802716024 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 720
Book Description
Drawing upon the satirical prints of the eighteenth century, the author explores what made Londoners laugh and offers insight into the origins of modern attitudes toward sex, celebrity, and ridicule.
Author: Thomas M. Honegger Publisher: ISBN: 9783905703351 Category : Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
"It is precisely against the darkness of the world that comedy arises, and it is best when that is not hidden." JRRT to R. Unwin Just like Tolkien's first reviewer, academic studies have tended to overlook the presence of humour in Tolkien's work and the effect of his work to inspire humour. This volume more than compensates for this oversight.
Author: Sam Friedman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135009015 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.
Author: Louise Lee
Author: 
Author: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor
Author: Michael Billig
Author: Jerome K. Jerome
Author: George Vasey
Author: Vic Gatrell
Author: Thomas M. Honegger
Author: U. C. Knoepflmacher
Author: Sam Friedman