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Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930

By Jonathan Taylor

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 Contemporary literature

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930

By Jonathan Taylor

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Description
Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield - texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called 'superiority theories' of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys -a transcendent, 'perfect' laughter which exists only in and for itself.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
268
Release Date:
2019-02-22
Publication Date:
2019-02-22
Publisher:
Springer
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
3030114120
ISBN13:
9783030114121
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
463 g
Height:
153 cm
Width:
216 cm
Thickness:
20 cm
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