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This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts-verbal, visual and aural-through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal.
Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.
List of contents
Foreword: The Intersection of Humour Studies and Cultural History
Jessica Milner Davis Introduction: Reading Humorously: Towards New Perspectives
Shun-liang Chao and Vivienne Westbrook 1. Literary Humour in English: A Short Cultural History
Robert S. White 2. Unbidden to the Banquet: Humour in the Classical Period
R. Drew Griffith 3. Understatement and Incongruity: Humour in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England
Jonathan Wilcox 4. Laughter and Humour in Middle English Texts
Anne M. Scott 5. Shakespeare's Reformation Humour
Vivienne Westbrook 6. "To Make Fools Laugh, and Women Blush, and Wise Men Ashamed": Humour in the English Restoration
Lyndsey Bakewell and Sara Read 7. Beyond Slapstick: Humour, Physicality, and Empathic Performance in
G. E. Lessing's Comedies
Pascale LaFountain 8. Emerson's Sad Clown: American Transcendentalism and the Dilemma of the Humourist
John Michael Corrigan 9. The Congruity of Incongruity: Victorian Intermedial Humour
Mou-Lan Wong 10.
"A Tomato Is Also a Child's Balloon": Surrealist Humour as a Moral Attitude
Shun-liang Chao Conclusion
John Morreall
About the author
Vivienne Westbrook is an Adjunct Professor at The University of Western Australia and a member of St. John's College, Cambridge. She has received numerous international endorsements for her work in cultural history, including a Presidential Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Shun-liang Chao is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan and currently a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. He is the author of
Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte (Routledge, 2010), awarded an Honourable Mention in 2013 for the Anna Balakian Prize of the International Comparative Literature Association.
Summary
Demonstrating the usefulness of reading verbal and visual texts through a framework of humour, this collection examines how, structurally and strategically, humour has engaged with audiences in different historical contexts in the West and contributed more broadly to cultural formation and transformation.
