Product Description: First published in 1987. While there have been commentaries on his humour, his seriousness, his social concerns, and other specific aspects of his work such accounts have only tended to divide our understanding of the novels, to lead us to see them as failures of artistic unity...read more

Irony's Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic and its relationship to irony in German letters.Combining theoretical breadth with close textual analysis, Erica Weitzman shows how irony, a key term for the German romantics, reemerged in the early twentieth century from a postromantic relegation to the nonsensical and the nihilistic in a way that both rethought romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach.Through readings of works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth against the rich history of comic theory (particularly Hegel and Freud), Weitzman traces the development of a specifically comic irony in modern German-language literature and philosophy, a play with the irony that is itself the condition for all play. She thus provides a crucial reevaluation of German literary history and offers new insights into the significance of irony and the comic from the Enlightenment to the present.

Product Description: What is the cumulative impact of the immense social, economic, and political changes that Africa has undergone in recent decades? What opportunities do those changes present to improve the lives of the continent s citizens? Countering the prevailing mood of pessimism in the face of disappointed expectations, the authors of Governing Africa s Changing Societies demonstrate the significance of even incomplete reforms in the areas of competitive elections and democratization, gender relations, property rights, the public sector, and privatization, among others...read more

Product Description: Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto, premodern Europe's three greatest comic poets, found abundant cause for laughter in the foibles and follies of human desire. Yet they also excelled at the dangerous game of skewering the elites on whom they depended for patronage...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Lawrence's novels, short stories, plays, letters and poems are full of comic moments that develop his critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse...read more

Product Description: There is a mountain of work on Shakespeare's comedies but very little on what, in all the plays, can be described as comic. In this book that topic is approached via a number of practical joke episodes, some of them well known - the deceptions Hal and Poins practice on Falstaff, the tricking of Malvolio or Parolles - the others a little less so (the "Induction" to The Taming of the Shrew, for example)...read more

Product Description: One of the few constants in Western critical though for over two millennia has been the inexhaustible fascination with comedy: what it is and how it works. Yet comedy has eluded every definition. Why have so many of the leading critics and philosophers of the West proposed theories and counter-theories of comedy while often admitting that it enthralls and baffles the mind in equal measure? "The Idea of Comedy: A Critique" assembles a rich corpus of materials from different languages and eras to construct a history of the commentaries and reflections, the theoretical postulates and conjectures, and the often acrimonious debates about comedy through the centuries from Plato and Aristotle to our contemporaries...read more

Product Description: From the author of Ascendant Sun, the Saga of the Skolian Empire continues in this Nebula Award-Winning Novel.Kamoj Argali is the young ruler of an impoverished province on a backward planet. To keep her people from starving, she has agreed to marry Jax Ironbridge, the boorish and brutal ruler of a prosperous province...read more

Product Description: Comedy and Culture examines the ways on which the culture and society of the Middle Ages impacted on the works of the Sienese poet, Cecco Angiolieri (c.1260-1312). It analyses how Angiolieri's poetry conformed to medieval notions and practices of comicality...read more

This is the only contemporary critical study to discuss the nature of comedy with exclusive reference to novels. It examines the comic styles of novelists from Fielding and Jane Austen to Waugh and Angus Wilson, as well as less familiar writers such as Ronald Firbank and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Distinguishing between different kinds of humor, it shows how comedy works in practice under changing literary, social, and environmental conditions, and is designed to interest academic and general readers equally.