A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and BeyondManfred Pfister Rodopi, 2002 - 201 страница Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all - in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter - in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how? |
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Страница vii
... question . The simplest is that we , the authors of this collection of essays , are not primarily sociologists or social historians but literary critics . Our professional expertise lies in reading texts , in analysing the symbolic ...
... question . The simplest is that we , the authors of this collection of essays , are not primarily sociologists or social historians but literary critics . Our professional expertise lies in reading texts , in analysing the symbolic ...
Страница 1
... question of ' what they really laughed about / at ' . To broaden the perspective , a few examples from Old Norse literature will be included . This serves the purpose of complementing what we know from Anglo - Saxon sources and ...
... question of ' what they really laughed about / at ' . To broaden the perspective , a few examples from Old Norse literature will be included . This serves the purpose of complementing what we know from Anglo - Saxon sources and ...
Страница 6
... questions , as Magennis34 has pointed out , the validity of the communal sentiment represented by the dream of the hall . This contrast is strengthened by the acoustic similarity between hleopor and hleahtor . And again , laughter and ...
... questions , as Magennis34 has pointed out , the validity of the communal sentiment represented by the dream of the hall . This contrast is strengthened by the acoustic similarity between hleopor and hleahtor . And again , laughter and ...
Страница 9
... question on the other . It is worth noting that laughter does not appear as an element of hall decorum in Old Saxon literature and is unusual for Old Norse literature56 - it thus seems to be a special trait of Old English poetry . 4 ...
... question on the other . It is worth noting that laughter does not appear as an element of hall decorum in Old Saxon literature and is unusual for Old Norse literature56 - it thus seems to be a special trait of Old English poetry . 4 ...
Страница 18
... question by a number of critics . Paul Strohm has pointed out that Carnival might in certain circumstances serve as a kind of safety - valve and thus actually strengthen the system of power it seems to subvert ( Strohm 1992 , 45 n.9 ) ...
... question by a number of critics . Paul Strohm has pointed out that Carnival might in certain circumstances serve as a kind of safety - valve and thus actually strengthen the system of power it seems to subvert ( Strohm 1992 , 45 n.9 ) ...
Садржај
17 | |
Indira Ghose | 35 |
Werner von Koppenfels | 57 |
Ute Berns | 83 |
Merle Tönnies | 99 |
Tobias Döring | 121 |
Jeremy Lane | 137 |
Renate Brosch | 153 |
Manfred Pfister | 175 |
Index | 191 |
Чести термини и фразе
Absolon Alisoun analysis audience laughter Bakhtin Beckett behaviour Beowulf biblical body burlesque Byron Canterbury Tales Carnival carnivalesque character Chaucer Christ Christian comedy concept contemporary critical culture Democritus drama emotional essay evoked expression fabliau fiction Finnegans Wake fool Freud Freudian gender genre God's Gothic Novel hermeneutical Höfuðlausn human humour incongruity instance interpretation James James's jokes Joyce kind of laughter Lachen language laugh literary London n.d. madness Maturin's meaning medieval Melmoth the Wanderer melodrama Miller's Tale Milton mirth moral n.d. first performed narrative narrator Nineteenth Century Njörðr norms novel Number Old English literature Paradise Lost parody Pfister plays Plessner poem political Pope Pope's pryvetee quote reaction readers relation religious response ridicule role Romantic Rune Poem satanic satire seems sense sexual Shakespeare's Skaði social spectators spleen stage Stephen Sterne Sterne's superior laughter theatre theatrical theory of laughter tradition Tristram Shandy turn type of laughter
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