French Laughter

Literary Humour from Diderot to Toirnier

By: Walter Redfern

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Hardcover | 21 February 2008

At a Glance

Hardcover
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 1.91

Hardcover

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The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor.

In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Valles and la blague; exaggeration in Valles and Cd'eline (Mort a credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Meteores).

Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

Industry Reviews

Redfern's book yomps joyously through many kinds of comedy...Un Drole de livre, in all the best senses. Steven Poole. The Guardian [an] insightful analysis of the use of humour by various luminaries of the French literary world, including Diderot, Flaubert and Rousseau, offers a highly thought-provoking study that many will find fascinating. French Magazine An excellent jaunt. Christie Davis. Times Higher Education

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