Overview
- Provides a new theoretical framework for the development of comedy studies in the Victorian period
- Charts the falling-up of the joke as part of nineteenth century modernity
- Argues that the Victorians, in an age of exploding print and stage culture, experienced laugh-out-loud moments similar to our own today
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About this book
This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear,George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone,Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke — both on the page and the stage — while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Jokes
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This volume is an enjoyable read and a comfortable entry point into the field of Victorian comedy and laughter, both for those familiar with the subject and for those new to it. I hope that readers of Victorian Studies will take up its invitation. … this book will furnish you with conviviality, jokes, and just the right amount of dissent.” (Laura Kasson Fiss, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (1), 2022)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Louise Lee is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Roehampton University, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Victorian Comedy and Laughter
Book Subtitle: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent
Editors: Louise Lee
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-57881-5Published: 07 August 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-84600-9Due: 21 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-57882-2Published: 06 August 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 359
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations, 7 illustrations in colour
Topics: British and Irish Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Cultural History, Theatre History