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Full Description
Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all - in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter - in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how?
Contents
Manfred PFISTER: Introduction: A History of English Laughter?
Susanne KRIES: Laughter and Social Stability in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Literature
Andrew James JOHNSTON: The Exegetics of Laughter: Religious Parody in Chaucer's Miller's Tale
Indira GHOSE: Licence to Laugh: Festive Laughter in Twelfth Night
Susanne RUPP: Milton's Laughing God
Werner von KOPPENFELS: 'Nothing is ridiculous but what is deformed': Laughter as a Test of Truth in Enlightenment Satire
Kay HIMBERG: 'Against the Spleen': Sterne and the Tradition of Remedial Laughter
Ute BERNS: The Romantic Crisis of Expression: Laughter in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Beyond
Merle TÖNNIES: Laughter in Nineteenth-Century British Theatre: From Genial Blending to Harsh Distinctions
Tobias DÖRING: Freud about Laughter - Laughter about Freud
Jeremy LANE: James Joyce's Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Renate BROSCH: The Funny Side of James: Gendered Humour in and against Henry James
Manfred PFISTER: Beckett, Barker, and Other Grim Laughers.
Index
