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List of contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Humour and Imprisonment
2. Humour in the Cell: Prison Cells and War Camps
3. Social Entrapment: Humoristic Characters vs. the World
4. Humour in the Cells: Configurations of the Body as Prison
Conclusion: A Geometry of Humour
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard teaches French and Francophone literatures at the University of Montréal and the University of Ottawa, Canada. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her work in comparative literature and humour studies has been supported by multiple scholarships and has received the Canadian Comparative Literature Association Esther Cheung Award (2017) and an Outstanding Presentation Award at the International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter (2016).
Summary
Contrary to what their oppressive design would lead us to believe, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour? Starting from the most obvious areas of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Framing Literary Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment.
Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyses selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour.
Foreword
Examines how spaces of imprisonment incite humour as an expression of liberation in 20th-century European fiction.
Additional text
At once rigorous and illuminating, Mathieu-Lessard's brilliant book poses major challenges to humor theories that celebrate laughter as pure transgression or liberation. She insightfully reveals the stakes of literary humor in representations of imprisonment, spanning diverse sites of confinement from the Nazi war camp to the social mask to the mortal body. With eloquence and imagination, she grounds the very idea of humor in structures of captivity.
