Comedy

"An Essay on Comedy" by George Meredith. "Laughter" by Henri Bergson

By: Wylie Sypher (Editor)

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Paperback | 14 May 1980

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288 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
20.96 x 13.97 x 1.91

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Casting a critical eye on comic works throughout the ages, Meredith finds that the most skilled masters of the comic art--Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Moliere--used comedy to grasp the essence of humanity. Comedy, according to Meredith's theory, serves an important moral and social function: it redeems us from our posturings, stripping away pride, arrogance, complacency, and other sins.

Bergson's essay looks at comedy within a wider field of vision, focusing on laughter and on what makes us laugh. His study examines comic characters and comic acts, comedy in literature and in children's games, comedy as high art and base entertainment, to develop a psychological and philosophical theory of the mainsprings of comedy.

Complementing the work of Meredith and Bergson in Wylie Sypher's appendix, as essay that discusses comedy and the underlying comic structure in both anthropological and literaty contexts. Sypher offers an enlightening discussion of the relationship between comedy and tragedy and their link with the ritual purging of evil from a society by means of a scapegoat. He then goes on to examine the guises of the comic hero in such figures as the Wife of Bath, Don Quixote, and Falstaff, relating them to such great tragic figures as Oedipus, Faust, and Hamlet.

Through the many perspectives it offers, Comedy will appeal not only to students of literature and literary criticism, but to those studying philosophy and history as well.

Industry Reviews

""Probably the two best looks at the lighter side are these essays, the first by a master of the English novel of manners, the second by a philosopher who influenced a generation of French writers, including Proust... Contains a long index and appendix, the latter offering a wide-ranging historical inquiry into the comic.""

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Introduction	p. vii
An Essay on Comedy	p. 3
Laughter
The Comic in General	p. 61
The Comic Element in Forms and Movements	p. 74
Expansive Force of the Comic	p. 84
The Comic Element in Situations and the Comic Element in Words	p. 104
The Comic in Character	p. 146
The Meanings of Comedy
Our New Sense of the Comic	p. 193
The Ancient Rites of Comedy	p. 214
The Guises of the Comic Hero	p. 226
The Social Meanings of Comedy	p. 241
Notes	p. 256
Bibliographical Note	p. 259
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Comedy

"An Essay on Comedy" by George Meredith. "Laughter" by Henri Bergson

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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