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.
Inhoudsopgave
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”
Over de auteur
Louise Lee is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Roehampton University, UK.
Meer e-boeken van dezelfde auteur (s) / Editor
3.938 E-boeken in deze categorie
