San Antonio College Library

From Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, this is a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon. Beginning with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, the book then supplies close-readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres from the Medieval period to the present. The Comic Mode in English Literature examines such texts as: Shakespeare's A Midsummer...

In this boldly revisionary work, three noted Dickinson scholars take issue with the traditional tragic image of the poet. Focusing on the comic elements in Dickinson's art from a feminist point of view, they show how Dickinson uses the comedic resources of language to contest all types of orthodoxy and to offer the possibility of transforming society. Following a jointly written chapter on "Comedy and Performance in Emily Dickinson's Poetry," each...

Defends what Wood calls "secular comedy"-human, tragicomic, forgiving, bound up with the very origins of the novel -against the narrower "religious comedy" of satire and farce, which is corrective, punitive, and theatrical. [publisher web site].

"Drawing on a wide variety of texts in order to observe the comedic process in action, Glen Cavaliero examines the ways in which irony, satire, celebration, parody, farce and other categories of comedy function withing the confines of a novel."--Jacket

These essays survey the various comic forms employed in contemporary American literature, such as black comedy, ethnic humor, pop "dreck", and the urban tall tale. The writers discussed are Roth, Vonnegut, Bellow, Barthelme, and Nabokov.