Full Description
This title was first published in 2000: "Comedy" and "humour" are not words most associate with the Victorian period, yet their culture was rife with laughter and irony. The 12 essays in this volume reanimate this "comic spirit" by exploring the humour in its social context. While previous studies of humour in the period focus on the age's own ongoing interest in the old distinction in comic theory between wit and humour, this volume aims to show how inadequate this distinction is in accounting for the many types of Victorian comic representation. The essays turn from linguistic or psychological analyses of humour towards the social production of humour and the cultural dynamics which underlie it.
Contents
1: Parody, Pastiche, and the Play of Genres: The Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; 2: The Fissure King: Parody, Ideology, and the Imperialist Narrative; 3: Laughing at the Almighty: Freethinking Lampoon, Satire, and Parody in Victorian England; 4: Tipping Mr. Punch "the Haffable Wink": E. J. Milliken's Cockney Verse Letters; 5: American Humor: The Mark of Twain on Jerome K. Jerome; 6: Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford; 7: Dickens's Dystopian Metacomedy: Hard Times , Morals, and Religion; 8: Transcendence through Incongruity: The Background of Humor in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; 9: 'Tailing into Philistine Hands": Swinburne's Transgressive Correspondence; 10: Arnold's Irony and the Deployment of Dandyism; 11: Salomé : Re/Dressing Wilde on the Rim; 12: The Laugh of the New Woman
