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Subject Area: Literature - Humor
Cairns, Christopher1996 0-7734-8821-9 452 pages
This volume offers newly-translated texts of three established classics of Italian Renaissance comedy, with scholarly introductions and bibliographies for each: Ariosto's seminal second play, The Supposes; Machiavelli's Mandrake; and the composition of the Sienese Intronati, The Deceived. The works are linked by documentable bond of influence, and also represent a solid chapter in the history of theatrical staging, since there are traces of evidence of idealised cityscape perspective sets for early performances of both The Supposes and The Deceived. These plays embody distinctive traditions and contributions to the genesis of European comedy.
DuBruck, Edelgard E.
1993 0-7734-9328-X 186 pages
This study examines two fields of research: German society of the fifteenth century, and its carnival comedies. This is a detailed treatment of the four classes (peasants, urban middle class, clergy, and nobility), including such aspects as health, the self and its historicity, and general rules of conduct. The German carnival plays are valuable literary texts allowing insight into fifteenth-century life. This book examines most of the 127 comedies in the Keller collection, listed in one of the indices, and provides translations of all quotations into modern English. It also contains a synoptic tabulation of the Nürnberg plays, valuable to both drama specialists and medievalists.
Chinery, Mary C.
2011 0-7734-1550-5 184 pages
This work analyzes Willa Cather’s fiction using images of laughter, feasting and dancing. The study employs Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival and demonstrates that for Cather, festivals are transformative events.
Gallagher, David
2010 0-7734-1440-1 228 pages
A collection of essays that explore the very dynamics of comedy, jokes laughter and theorization from early writings of antiquity to contemporary modern day fiction and fits well into the genre of comparative literature and will pose many opportunities for further scholarship.
Aldred, Honor J.
2009 0-7734-3855-6 312 pages
In this work, theories of comedy are used to examine the techniques and processes in Marot’s poetry. It begins by considering his use of humor in its historical context, his story-telling skills, and his skill in manipulating language for humor, especially in puns, quotation and allusion. The full extent of the inspiration Marot draws from François Villon becomes apparent in his use of allusion.
Giraldi, G. B.
1999 0-7734-8191-5 224 pages
This is the first reliable version of Giraldi's sole comedy, Gli Eudemoni (The Lucky Ones), completed in 1549. The five Acts of the play proper are preceded by a prologue, showing that, in all probability, it was intended for public performance; but there is some doubt as to whether the author ever in fact mounted a production of it. Illustrates the theories on comedy enunciated by the author in the contemporary Discorso intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie, first published in 1554.
Sutton, James H.
1997 0-7734-2808-9
A comedy in a form the French called Vers de Société. Lawfully deranged by his dentist, Harry imagines that he's a keeper in a zoo and that his monkeys are sick. Examining their spiritual lapses and his own, he looks for, and finds, a cure for the malaise of our time. It's about everything that vexes our country, our selves and our spirit. It's meant to define this moment and our place in time. It may be the first long poem to illustrate Chaos Theory. It's non-linear and controlled by hidden attractors, and everything in it connects with everything else.
Sutton, James H.
1997 0-7734-2812-7 290 pages
Comic definitions on slang, puns, half lies, litotes, hyperbole and other tropes describing and as a companion to Harry's Gloom.
Sutton, James H.
2003 0-7734-3492-5 162 pages
Third in a trilogy of sonnet sequences about a young man’s quest for manhood. In Harry’s Gloom, he finds purgatory when unable to create significance. In this book, he finds heaven by recognizing and memorializing moments of happiness, often tiny, until they merge.
Schmid, Thomas H.
1992 0-7734-9563-0 216 pages
Examines with singular determination the subject of the comic in romanticism. Deliberately proposing an alternative mode to either neoclassical satire or Schlegelian irony, Humor and Transgression shows how major comic works of the Shelley circle sympathetically laugh at the limitations of various cultural and textual "frames" imposed upon both the comic object and the writer. Making deft use of contemporary literary theorists, particularly Umberto Eco and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book presents a timely contribution to Romantic studies that rightly restores the humor to readings of texts like Shelley's Witch of Atlas and Byron's Beppo, thus filling a longstanding gap in studies of the comic between the neoclassical and Victorian periods.
West, Jim
2007 0-7734-5482-9 108 pages
Huldrych Zwingli, the “third man of the Reformation,” is generally remembered as a stern, abrupt and solemn individual. This characterization was proven wrong with the publication of Fritz Schmidt-Clausing’s volume on the humor of Zwingli (Otto Lembeck Verlag, 1968). This volume, long out of print, is now offered again in a bilingual German/English edition, making Zwingli’s humorous remarks, anecdotes, and stories accessible to students, scholars and interested laypersons once again.
Cherry, Caroline Lockett
1974 0-7734-0304-3 273 pages
An in-depth study of Don Juan as a comic epic, examining the comic devices and narrative voices.
Pinsker, Sanford
1996 0-7734-2741-4
Fitzpatrick, Tim
1995 0-7734-9003-5 468 pages
Beyond the Improvisation/Memorisation Divide This study argues that the performers who developed the commedia dell'arte in the 16th century did so by applying oral storytelling techniques to a multi-performer genre. The book argues that the predominant documentary evidence of this theatre phenomenon, the eight hundred extant scenarios, can be examined as specific literate elements in a theatrical production process which can be delineated in relation to other well-documented oral processes. Extensive analysis of scenarios from different collections demonstrates how the scenarios are structured for, and might have functioned in, performance: they provided a series of clear schematic units for which the performers could develop specific formulaic material able to be quickly and fluently strung together to create a seamless whole. Further analysis distills the scenarios into a finite list of categorized performance units to create a notional compendium of all the sorts of schematic material for which the performers would have needed to generate formulaic utterances and actions, a sort of 'encyclopedia of the performable which influenced not only this genre but much subsequent theatre practice.
Figueroa-Dorrego, Jorge
2009 0-7734-4730-X 660 pages
This work is an annotated collection of extracts from a wide variety of sources that illustrate Western thought on the subject of humour and laughter from Antiquity to Late Modernity. The selection of texts includes writings from more that 40 different authors, ranging from the most influential in humour studies (such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes, Hobbes, Hutcheson, Kant, Richter, Baudelaire, and Bergson) to others that are less frequently mentioned, such as Demetrius, the Church Fathers, Prynne, Barrow and Morris.
Aylett, Robert
1995 0-7734-1342-1 217 pages
Contains a general introduction to Sachs's carnival comedies together with nine plays in translation. The short situation comedies offer us brief but vivid enactments of scenes from daily life in the sixteenth century, humorously illustrating the petty foibles and weaknesses which govern us all. Yet in the few hundred lines which each occupies, he also touches on profound human truths, as well as highlighting current political and social ills. The plays will be of general interest to students of history, sociology, drama, and of the human condition in general, as well as to those who simply enjoy well-crafted comedy.