Victorian Comedy and Laughter
Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent
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- 109,99 €
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- 109,99 €
Publisher Description
'A sparkling collection — at once authoritative and intrepid. Louise Lee has assembled a remarkable set of essays, shedding fresh light on the many lives of comedy at work and play in nineteenth-century culture (from poetry to fiction, circus to music hall, and beyond). This volume is a welcome contribution to Victorian studies; but, more importantly, it’s a reminder—in Lee’s words—that “laughter is good to think with.”'
- Matthew Bevis, University of Oxford & author of Wordsworth's Fun (2019)
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.