Humor In Twentieth Century British Literature

Analyzes humor in literary works by British authors of the 20th century and provides extensive bibliographical information.

During the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain there was a wide range of literary humor. Much of this humor was satiric, ranging from the sharp barbs of Pope and Swift to the more subtle but stinging wordplay of Addison. In the 18th century, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne wrote humorous novels, in which they criticized society. The period was largely dominated by satire, in which the dunce was a common figure. There was a proliferation of satires in prose and verse, along with satiric operas, pamphlets, and other writings. During the 19th century, writers such as Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Carlyle continued to use humor to comment on the issues of their day, though their writings were often far more gentle than those of their predecessors. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to how British writers of the 18th and 19th centuries used humor in their works. An introductory chapter overviews humor in British literature of the era. The sections that follow then treat humor in British literature of the 18th century and of the early, middle, and later 19th century. Each of these sections includes a short introduction, followed by chronologically arranged profiles of various authors. Each profile discusses how the author used humor and includes extensive bibliographic information. A thorough index allows the reader to access information alphabetically, while the chronological arrangement of the profiles shows how humor in British literature evolved over time.

Analyzes humor in literary works by British authors of the 20th century and provides extensive bibliographical information.

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression. Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

An overview of scholarship on humor in British literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration.

Examines the right to parody as a natural right in both the free speech and the copyright contexts.

The book is intended to provide a definitive view of the field of humor research for both beginning and established scholars in a variety of fields who are developing an interest in humor and need to familiarize themselves with the available body of knowledge. Each chapter of the book is devoted to an important aspect of humor research or to a disciplinary approach to the field, and each is written by the leading expert or emerging scholar in that area. There are two primary motivations for the book. The positive one is to collect and summarize the impressive body of knowledge accumulated in humor research in and around Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research. The negative motivation is to prevent the embarrassment to and from the "first-timers," often established experts in their own field, who venture into humor research without any notion that there already exists a body of knowledge they need to acquire before publishing anything on the subject-unless they are in the business of reinventing the wheel and have serious doubts about its being round! The organization of the book reflects the main groups of scholars participating in the increasingly popular and high-powered humor research movement throughout the world, an 800 to 1,000-strong contingent, and growing. The chapters are organized along the same lines: History, Research Issues, Main Directions, Current Situation, Possible Future, Bibliography-and use the authors' definitive credentials not to promote an individual view, but rather to give the reader a good comprehensive and condensed view of the area.