Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives [Hardcover]

This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching textsverbal, visual and auralthrough a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.

Foreword: The Intersection of Humour Studies and Cultural History  Jessica Milner Davis  Introduction: Reading Humorously: Towards New Perspectives  Shun-liang Chao and Vivienne Westbrook  1. Literary Humour in English: A Short Cultural History  Robert S. White  2. Unbidden to the Banquet: Humour in the Classical Period  R. Drew Griffith  3. Understatement and Incongruity: Humour in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England  Jonathan Wilcox  4. Laughter and Humour in Middle English Texts  Anne M. Scott  5. Shakespeares Reformation Humour  Vivienne Westbrook  6. To Make Fools Laugh, and Women Blush, and Wise Men Ashamed : Humour in the English Restoration  Lyndsey Bakewell and Sara Read  7. Beyond Slapstick: Humour, Physicality, and Empathic Performance in G. E. Lessings Comedies  Pascale LaFountain  8. Emersons Sad Clown: American Transcendentalism and the Dilemma of the Humourist l£(