Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930

Description

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself. Front Matter ....Pages i-x First and Last Laughs: Allegories, Hybrids and Histories, 1840–1930 (Jonathan Taylor)....Pages 1-48 His ‘Last Jest’: On Laughter, Edgar Allan Poe and ‘Hop-Frog’ (Jonathan Taylor)....Pages 49-88 ‘Unseemly Levity’: On Memoirs, Humour and Edmund Gosse (Jonathan Taylor)....Pages 89-160 ‘Perfect Laughter’: On War, Wyndham Lewis and The Wild Body (Jonathan Taylor)....Pages 161-217 ‘Derisive Laughter’: On Superiority, Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miss Brill’ (Jonathan Taylor)....Pages 219-234 Back Matter ....Pages 235-258