This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.
Arvustused
"Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives refreshes me at a time when humour has become rancid. Vivienne Westbrook and Shun-liang Chao return us to a lost world where humour could be good natured. -Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English, Yale University, USA
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vii | |
| Foreword: The Intersection of Humour Studies and Cultural History |
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viii | |
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| Acknowledgements |
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xiii | |
| Introduction: Reading Humorously: Towards New Perspectives |
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1 | (19) |
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1 Literary Humour in English: A Short Cultural History |
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20 | (20) |
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2 Unbidden to the Banquet: Humour in the Classical Period |
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40 | (19) |
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3 Understatement and Incongruity: Humour in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England |
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59 | (19) |
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4 Laughter and Humour in Middle English Texts |
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78 | (16) |
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5 Shakespeare's Reformation Humour |
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94 | (19) |
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6 "To Make Fools Laugh, and Women Blush, and Wise Men Ashamed": Humour in the English Restoration |
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113 | (15) |
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7 Beyond Slapstick: Humour, Physicality, and Empathic Performance in G. E. Lessing's Comedies |
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128 | (18) |
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8 Emerson's Sad Clown: American Transcendentalism and the Dilemma of the Humourist |
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146 | (21) |
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9 The Congruity of Incongruity: Victorian Intermedial Humour |
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167 | (27) |
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10 "A tomato is also a child's balloon": Surrealist Humour as a Moral Attitude |
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194 | (23) |
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| Conclusion |
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217 | (4) |
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| List of Contributors |
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221 | (4) |
| Index |
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225 | |
Vivienne Westbrook is an Adjunct Professor at The University of Western Australia and a member of St. Johns College, Cambridge. She has received numerous international endorsements for her work in cultural history, including a Presidential Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Shun-liang Chao is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan and currently a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. He is the author of Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte (Routledge, 2010), awarded an Honourable Mention in 2013 for the Anna Balakian Prize of the International Comparative Literature Association.
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