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In this textbook, dark comedy is re-imagined as an ecological instrument: a volatile compound of irony, grotesquerie, and mischievous insight that exposes the carbonised scaffolding of late-capitalist life. Rather than sneering at catastrophe, the chapters anatomise the mechanics defamiliarising punch line, carnival inversion, affective whiplash by which humour slips past guard-dogs and rouses an anaesthetised public. The horizon against which this inquiry unfolds is the Capitalocene: a name that indicts capitalism, not Man, as the principal geological agent of ruin.
Moving from Aristophanes to Atwood, from street theatre to streaming satire, each text shows laughter doing intellectual lifting. In one moment it fractures complacent common sense; in the next it stitches together circuits of feeling in which eco-grief can transmute into civic resolve. Juxtaposed with the authority of tragic form, dark comedy proves the more permeable solvent: it dissolves cultural defences, lets paradox breathe, and leaves readers wondering how ecosystems became punch-lines.
Methodologically the book is multidisciplinary. Literary tangles with environmental philosophy; humour theory quarrels with eco-Marxism; cultural studies supplies the ethnographic grit that keeps abstraction honest. By braiding those strands the argument departs from standard ecocritical curricula, insisting that jokes are not side-shows but catalytic sites where ethics, affect, and political economy collide.
Designed for advanced undergraduates yet hospitable to researchers, the volume refuses the consolations of easy optimism even as it gestures toward actionable hope. Its wager is simple: teach readers to hear the subversive crackle inside dark laughter and they may also learn to re-script the damaged world that provokes it.
List of contents
Chapter 01: INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING DARK COMEDY S ROLE IN ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS.- Chapter 02: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS UNDERSTANDING DARK COMEDY AND ITS MECHANISMS.- Chapter 03: THE CAPITALOCENE REFRAMING ECOLOGICAL CRISES.- Chapter 04: MECHANISMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING THROUGH DARK COMEDY.- Chapter 05: CASE STUDIES DARK COMEDY IN ECOLOGICAL LITERATURE.- Chapter 06: DISTINGUISHING OUTCOMES DARK COMEDY VS. OTHER GENRES IN ECOCRITICISM.- Chapter 07: DARK COMEDY AS SUBVERSION CHALLENGING DOMINANT NARRATIVES.- Chapter 08: THE FUTURE OF ECOLOGICAL LITERATURE TOWARDS A PLAYFUL ECOCRITICISM.
About the author
Mohammad Rahmatullah
is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Northern University Bangladesh.
Tanu Gupta
is Professor and Head in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Central University of Haryana, Mahendergarh.
Nagendra Kumar
is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
