ENGLISH

The Humanist Comedy

By Alexander Welsh

Book information

Publisher
Yale University Press
Year
2014
ISBN
9780300206869
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1168122 bytes)
Pages
280\276
Time added
2023-05-30 05:03:59

Description

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world’s religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius, and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and Enlightenment essays and philosophical texts, together with the inherent skepticism about life after death in tragicomedies by Plautus, Shakespeare, Molière, and nineteenth-century novels by such as Dickens and Hugo, the literary critic and historian Alexander Welsh analyzes the prevalence of openness of mind and relieving good humor in Western thought. The Humanist Comedy concludes with close examination of a postmodern novel by the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago.

Similar books