1st Edition

The Victorian Comic Spirit New Perspectives

By Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Copyright 2000
272 Pages
by Routledge

272 Pages
by Routledge

272 Pages
by Routledge

This title was first published in 2000:  "Comedy" and "humour" are not words most associate with the Victorian period, yet their culture was rife with laughter and irony. The 12 essays in this volume reanimate this "comic spirit" by exploring the humour in its social context. While previous studies of humour in the period focus on the age's own ongoing interest in the old distinction in... Read more
1: Parody, Pastiche, and the Play of Genres: The Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; 2: The Fissure King: Parody, Ideology, and the Imperialist Narrative; 3: Laughing at the Almighty: Freethinking Lampoon, Satire, and Parody in Victorian England; 4: Tipping Mr. Punch “the Haffable Wink”: E. J. Milliken’s Cockney Verse Letters; 5: American Humor: The Mark of Twain on Jerome K. Jerome; 6: Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford; 7: Dickens’s Dystopian Metacomedy: Hard Times , Morals, and Religion; 8: Transcendence through Incongruity: The Background of Humor in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus; 9: ‘Tailing into Philistine Hands”: Swinburne’s Transgressive Correspondence; 10: Arnold’s Irony and the Deployment of Dandyism; 11: Salomé : Re/Dressing Wilde on the Rim; 12: The Laugh of the New Woman

Biography

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor