Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent

ISBN-13: 9781349846009 / Angielski

Louise Lee

Opis

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.

Spis treści

1.Introduction:Victorian Comedy & Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent.- 2. Chapter 2: Malcolm Andrews, ‘Laughter & Conviviality’. - 3. Chapter 3: Jonathan Buckmaster, ‘Brutal Buffoonery and Clown Atrocity: Dickens’s Pantomime Violence’. - 4. Chapter 4: Peter Swaab, ‘Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe’.- 5. Chapter 5: Bob Nicholson, ‘“Capital Company”: Writing and Telling Jokes in Victorian Britain’.- 6. Chapter 6: Louise Lee, ‘George Eliot’s Jokes’.- 7. Chapter 7: Ann Featherstone, ‘The Game of Words: A Victorian Clown’s Gag-book and Circus Performance’. - 8. Chapter 8: Louise Wingrove, ‘“Sassin’ back”: Victorian Serio-Comediennes and Their Audiences’.- 9. Chapter 9: Oliver Double, ‘“Deliberately Shaped for Fun by the High Gods”: Little Tich, Size and Respectability in the Music Hall’. - 10. Chapter 10: Peter Jones, ‘Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall’. - 11. Chapter 11: Jonathan Wild, ‘What was New about the “New Humour”?: Barry Pain’s “Divine Carelessness”’. - 12. Chapter 12: Matthew Kaiser, ‘Just Laughter: Neurodiversity in Oscar Wilde’s “Pen, Pencil and Poison”

       

O autorze

Louise Lee is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Roehampton University, UK.

     

           

Blurb

'A sparkling collection — at once authoritative and intrepid. Louise Lee has assembled a remarkable set of essays, shedding fresh light on the many lives of comedy at work and play in nineteenth-century culture (from poetry to fiction, circus to music hall, and beyond). This volume is a welcome contribution to Victorian studies; but, more importantly, it’s a reminder—in Lee’s words—that “laughter is good to think with.”'

- Matthew Bevis, University of Oxford & author of Wordsworth's Fun (2019)

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.