Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Studies how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference.

List of contents

• Introduction: Humor and Empathy


• 1: "Tell me the Truth": Humor, Love, and Community in Auden's Late-Thirties Poetry


• 2: "Humor Saves Steps": Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore


• 3: Distance, and Intimacy, and T. S. Eliot's Self-Critical Laughter


• 4: "Shocked at my Levity": Humor and Immortality in Ezra Pound


• 5: Sterling Brown's Laughter Out of Hell


• 6: Elizabeth Bishop's Equivocal Communions


• 7: Laughter and Knowledge in Contemporary Poetry


• Bibliography

About the author

Rachel Trousdale is an Associate Professor of English at Framingham State University. She is the author of Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination and editor of Humor in Modern American Poetry.

Summary

Studies how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference.

Additional text

For Trousdale, each poet is not merely interested in humor as a device but is also a theorist of humor whose understanding of it links to much broader concerns that course through their poetry and poetics.

Product details

• Authors: Rachel Trousdale, Rachel (Associate Professor of English Trousdale, Trousdale Rachel
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9780192895714
• ISBN: 978-0-19-289571-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; USA, English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, Literary studies: poetry & poets, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Literary studies: poetry and poets