The Poetics of Literary Nonsense

The book outlines the course of Victorian Nonsense as a playful form of children's literature and its resurgence in the modernist novel as a dialogic form of writing that calls attention to the physicality of the text: its texture, sound, shape and colour. It traces the manner in which literary nonsense and its corresponding irrationality and chaos have been addressed. The book aims to widen the critical understanding of literary nonsense and to draw the topic away from the category of juvenile literature. It examines the kinetic languages and narratives namely Lear's limericks, Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and Sylvie and Bruno that made up the greater part of Victorian nonsense literature through to James Joyce's Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Samuel Becket's The Trilogy and Flan O'Brien's At Swim-Two Birds and The Third Policeman. The book defines nonsense literatur as an incongruous heap of narrative, stylistic and linguistic fragments that create an illuminating meaning. The book concludes that literary nonsense provides a literature addressing the irrational as rational.

Autorentext

After finishing her PhD research at University of Sussex, 2008, Hana Khasawneh joined the English Department of Yarmouk University in Jordan as an Assistant Professor. She teaches a wide range of literary courses across different genres and periods, including the Irish Modernist Literature.