Framing Literary Humour
Subtitle: Cells, Masks and Bodies As 20th-Century Sites of Imprisonment
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc; Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9781501356551
Subjects: Literature, modern, history and criticism, 20th century; Wit and humor, history and criticism
Description: "Contrary to their oppressive design, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour, itself a form of liberation? Starting from the most obvious cases of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Containing Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment. Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyzes selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour"--