A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and BeyondManfred Pfister 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? |
From inside the book
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Page viii
... genres resound with laughter . And there is no national theatre in Europe that can draw upon such a rich tradition of comedies in their own language as the English . Where the German theatre has less than a handful of comedies made in ...
... genres resound with laughter . And there is no national theatre in Europe that can draw upon such a rich tradition of comedies in their own language as the English . Where the German theatre has less than a handful of comedies made in ...
Page ix
... genres : the Restoration culture of provocative wit and transgressive laughter , for instance , or Jane Austen and Charles Dickens , the music hall and film and television , or , most regrettably , popular culture in general , a main ...
... genres : the Restoration culture of provocative wit and transgressive laughter , for instance , or Jane Austen and Charles Dickens , the music hall and film and television , or , most regrettably , popular culture in general , a main ...
Page 1
... genres , to examine the possible functions of laughter in the early Middle Ages . It is , of course , the literary rep- resentation of laughter that we shall interpret , independent of the question of ' what they really laughed about ...
... genres , to examine the possible functions of laughter in the early Middle Ages . It is , of course , the literary rep- resentation of laughter that we shall interpret , independent of the question of ' what they really laughed about ...
Page 5
... genre difference between Andreas and The Life of St Andrew - broadly speaking verse vs. prose - allowed for the notion of the more pre- Christian associations of laughter to enter the text . Indeed , much of the imagery of Andreas is ...
... genre difference between Andreas and The Life of St Andrew - broadly speaking verse vs. prose - allowed for the notion of the more pre- Christian associations of laughter to enter the text . Indeed , much of the imagery of Andreas is ...
Page 22
... genre abounds in stories about old men married to young wives seduced by young lovers . The union of an old man with a woman considerably younger than himself was treated as a scandal , a kind of sin against nature and was . therefore ...
... genre abounds in stories about old men married to young wives seduced by young lovers . The union of an old man with a woman considerably younger than himself was treated as a scandal , a kind of sin against nature and was . therefore ...
Contents
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 |
Common terms and phrases
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
Popular passages
Page 61 - Now awful beauty puts on all its arms; The fair each moment rises in her charms, Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace, And calls forth all the wonders of her face; Sees by degrees a purer blush arise, And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.
Page 62 - Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike...
Page 63 - Gen'rous converse ; a soul exempt from pride ; And love to praise, with reason on his side? Such once were Critics ; such the happy few, Athens and Rome in better ages knew.
Page 62 - Peace to all such ! but were there one whose fires True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires; Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease : Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne...
Page 49 - The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, 3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
Page 169 - Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.
Page 61 - A heav'nly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears ; Th' inferior priestess, at her altar's side, Trembling begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here...
Page 78 - He gave the little wealth he had, To build a house for fools and mad: And showed by one satiric touch, No nation wanted it so much: That kingdom he hath left his debtor, I wish it soon may have a better.
Page 50 - This is dispensed ; and what surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so, By likening spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them best ; though what if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought...