Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Humor

A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor--in a variety of forms--to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001, and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming...

Lucian and His Roman Voices examines cultural exchanges, political propaganda, and religious conflicts in the Early Roman Empire through the eyes of Lucian, his contemporary Roman authors, and Christian Apologists. Offering a multi-faceted analysis of the Lucianic corpus, this book explores how Lucian, a Syrian who wrote in Greek and who became a Roman citizen, was affected by the socio-political climate of his time, reacted to it, and how he 'corresponded' with the Roman intelligentsia. In the process, this unique volume raises questions such as: What did the title 'Roman...

The reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II was a transitional period in German history when the traditions of the nineteenth century were coming into conflict with the emerging cultural, social, and political patterns of the twentieth century. The resulting tensions were clearly reflected in the period's leading satirical journals, Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus.

Both journals appealed to a diverse middle-class readership and attracted widespread attention through their flamboyant and sometimes scurrilous attacks on authority. Their satire, expressed through cartoons, anecdotes,...

In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in oppositional binaries of simple versus complex humor. The varied combinations of so-called high and low forms of humor within junior texts for young readers, who are at such a crucial stage of their reading and social development, provide a valuable commentary upon the culture and values of contemporary western society, making the book of...

Arguing that the comic is a quality of literary works of art in other forms as well as comedy, George McFadden finds its essence in the maintenance of some literary feature--a situation, a character--as itself despite threats to alter it.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and...

Comedy cannot be understood as an abstract critical concept, argues Roger Henkle; it 'must be studied in specific cultural and historical contexts. From this point of view he examines the development of literary comedy in nineteenth-century England, and shows how comic modes and techniques were used to express and release the tensions of the middle class during periods of both rapid cultural change and relative stability.

Originally published in 1980.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print...

Philippe de Vigneulles (1471--1528), cloth merchant and hosier from the city of Metz, wrote a collection of comic short stories which he called Cent Nouvelles ou contes joyeux. The work constitutes an important step in the development of the nouvelle form in France. In an extended explication, Ms. Kotin analyzes the tales for the modern reader, historically, generically, structurally, and in terms of their human significance.

Inscribed in a tradition of short narrative forms in late medieval and early Renaissance France, these tales remake or recast traditional narrative patterns...

"Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us" -- Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748).

In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed "every opprobrious...

In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse.

Bryant shows...

Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use -Mark Twain- as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made -Mark Twain- the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. And so it remains in ours, because Mark Twain's humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in which humor and culture coalesce in today's postindustrial information economy--the global trade in...