Victorian Comedy and Laughter

This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear,George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone,Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke both on the page and the stage while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.

Provides a new theoretical framework for the development of comedy studies in the Victorian period Charts the falling-up of the joke as part of nineteenth century modernity Argues that the Victorians, in an age of exploding print and stage culture, experienced laugh-out-loud moments similar to our own today

Autorentext
Louise Lee is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Roehampton University, UK.

Zusammenfassung
"This volume is an enjoyable read and a comfortable entry point into the field of Victorian comedy and laughter, both for those familiar with the subject and for those new to it. I hope that readers of Victorian Studies will take up its invitation. ... this book will furnish you with conviviality, jokes, and just the right amount of dissent." (Laura Kasson Fiss, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (1), 2022)

Inhalt

1.Introduction:Victorian Comedy & Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent.- 2. Chapter 2: Malcolm Andrews, 'Laughter & Conviviality'. - 3. Chapter 3: Jonathan Buckmaster, 'Brutal Buffoonery and Clown Atrocity: Dickens's Pantomime Violence'. - 4. Chapter 4: Peter Swaab, 'Edward Lear's Travels in Nonsense and Europe'.- 5. Chapter 5: Bob Nicholson, 'Capital Company: Writing and Telling Jokes in Victorian Britain'.- 6. Chapter 6: Louise Lee, 'George Eliot's Jokes'.- 7. Chapter 7: Ann Featherstone, 'The Game of Words: A Victorian Clown's Gag-book and Circus Performance'. - 8. Chapter 8: Louise Wingrove, 'Sassin' back: Victorian Serio-Comediennes and Their Audiences'.- 9. Chapter 9: Oliver Double, 'Deliberately Shaped for Fun by the High Gods: Little Tich, Size and Respectability in the Music Hall'. - 10. Chapter 10: Peter Jones, 'Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall'.- 11. Chapter 11: Jonathan Wild, 'What was New about the New Humour?: Barry Pain's Divine Carelessness'. - 12. Chapter 12: Matthew Kaiser, 'Just Laughter: Neurodiversity in Oscar Wilde's Pen, Pencil and Poison