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The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of au...

Celebrates the accomplishments of YA authors acclaimed for producing high-quality comedies, who have not yet been treated in a book-length bio-critical study. Simultaneously, it reminds readers that no matter how funny an author of fiction may be, if he shows off his wit in ways that fail to play a natural role in advancing his narrative, he is not writing good fiction. To demonstrate this, humorous passages are presented to illustrate the contribution a sense of humor can make to a work of fict...

Wendy Cope is one of Britain’s most popular poets: her first two collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in 1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners’ choice to succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising, then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has r...

Comedy cannot be understood as an abstract critical concept, argues Roger Henkle; it 'must be studied in specific cultural and historical contexts. From this point of view he examines the development of literary comedy in nineteenth-century England, and shows how comic modes and techniques were used to express and release the tensions of the middle class during periods of both rapid cultural change and relative stability. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the late...

Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Ward, an...

For many students of Japanese culture and visitors to Japan, Japanese humor seems obscure, difficult to find, and perhaps even nonexistent. By bringing together scholarly insights and original research by both Japanese and non-Japanese experts, Jessica Milner Davis bridges the differences between humor in Japan and the West and examines the entire spectrum of Japanese humor, from ancient traditions and surviving rituals of laughter to the norms of joke-telling in ordinary conversation in Japan a...

While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre. With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evalu...

Evening Standard's the Best Comedy Books of the Year, 2018Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018 'Joyfully entertaining. Full of warmth, wisdom and affectionate delight in the wonder and absurdity of being human.' Observer'Funny, honest and heart-warming.' Matt HaigWhat better way to understand ourselves than through the eyes of comedians - those who professionally examine our quirks on stage daily? In this touching and witty book, award-winning presenter and comic Robin Ince uses the life of the stand...

Look around you. The world is more homogenous than you think. Far too often, distinctions among people, places, and things are matters of degree rather than kind. Many are illusory. As satire, Little House of Imaginary Distinctions is meant to complement Steven Carter's previous book, Little House of Oxymorons, published by Hamilton Books in 2010.

Modern black humor represents a rich history of radical innovation stretching back to the antebellum period. Laughing Fit to Kill reveals how black writers, artists, and comedians have used humor across two centuries as a uniquely powerful response to forced migration and enslavement. Glenda Carpio traces how, through various modes of "conjuring," through gothic, grotesque and absurdist slapstick, through stinging satire, hyperbole, and burlesque, and through the strategic expression of racia...