Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Humor

Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts.

First, the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a virtually unknown and forgotten writer who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern...

Forty of the greatest fictional festivities as seen through the eyes of the world's greatest writers.

People love to party. And writers love to attend and document these occasions. The party is a useful literary device, not only for social commentary and satire but also as an occasion where characters can meet, fall in and out of love, or even get murdered.

A Curious Invitation is a humorous and informative guide to literature's most memorable parties. Some of these parties are depictions of real events, like the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of battle with...

The phenomenally popular Book of Lists series has sold millions of copies from coast to coast, enthralling trivia aficionados with fascinating infobits about simply everything Now the latest edition turns an evil eye toward the strange, the blood-curdling, and the macabre with spine-tingling fun facts from the dark side of entertainment. Chock-full of creepy information from the netherworlds of movies, TV, literature, video games, comic books, and graphic novels, The Book of Lists: Horror offers a blood-feast of forbidden knowledge that horror fans are hungry to devour,...

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.

Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she...

The period between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is often characterized as the age of extremes--while this era witnessed unprecedented violence and loss of human life, it also saw a surge in humorous entertainment in both democratic and authoritarian societies. The Politics of Humour examines how works such as satirical magazines and comedy films were used both to reaffirm group identity and to exclude those who did not belong.

The essays in this collection analyse the political and social context of comedy in Europe and the United States,...