It is an epistemology. In addition, the aesthetics of laughter is connected to the politics of the time. Paulson draws on Kundera and Bergson's studies of the comic to define humor as it was practiced by the English satirists. This reader could not help but wonder why a broader number of contemporary theorists of the comic and satire was not also examined. In the following chapters, however, one becomes aware that the defining framework for understanding laughter emerges from the texts analyzed.
Definition becomes self-definition.
In chapter 1, he traces the metaphor of madness and its evocation of laughter to Ariosto. Don Quixote's chivalric imagination and madness lead him to ape the heroic quest. Paulson's technique here, as in successive chapters, is to begin with the analysis of a scene from Don Quixote and then to compare it to analogous scenes in English works. In this chapter, he analyzes Don Quixote's invocation of the aesthetic response of the reader, when reading about the heroic exploits of the Knight of the Lake. In tracing the ideas of the imagination from Cervantes, to Hobbes, Locke, Swift, and Addison, Paulson convincingly concludes that Cervantes's imprint can be felt in England in the general acceptance of the deceptions of the imagination.