The absurd in literature

By: Neil Cornwell

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Hardcover | 30 August 2006

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368 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6

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Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.
The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) - as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

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"'I believe that with such a survey, Cornwell's book will be the new standard published volume on the absurd.' Professor Richard J. Lane"

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Preface	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Introductory
The theoretical absurd: an introduction	p. 2
The philosophical absurd	p. 2
Jokes, humour, nonsense and the absurd	p. 14
The socio-linguistic absurd	p. 23
Antecedents to the absurd	p. 33
From the ancients...	p. 33
Madness: mysteries to Shakespeare	p. 36
Nonsense, Swift and Sterne	p. 41
Romantic grotesque to 'higher' realism and pre-Surrealist nonsense	p. 43
Growth of the absurd
The twentieth century: towards the absurd	p. 66
Introductory pointers	p. 66
'Post-Impressionists' in England	p. 69
Avant-garde theory and practice	p. 74
Disparate European prose: Western and Eastern proto-absurdism	p. 86
Around the absurd I: twentieth-century absurdist practice	p. 99
Fernando Pessoa and the 'pessimistic absurd'	p. 100
Antonin Artaud and the 'cruelty' of the absurd	p. 107
Camus and the Dostoevsky connection	p. 114
Around the absurd II: the Theatre of the Absurd	p. 126
Ionesco and others: the French-language scene	p. 128
Pinter and others: the English-language scene	p. 133
The East European scene	p. 143
(Soviet) Russia: the OBERIU	p. 143
(Cold-War) Poland and Czechoslovakia	p. 147
Special authors
Daniil Kharms as minimalist-absurdist	p. 158
A Kharms sketch	p. 158
The Kharmsian canon	p. 160
A poetics of extremism	p. 163
Logic of the black miniature	p. 166
Pursuing the red-haired man	p. 169
Kharmsian others?	p. 175
Franz Kafka: otherness in the labyrinth of absurdity	p. 184
Kafka and the other(s)	p. 185
Kafka in the other(s)	p. 189
Falling and cawing in the labyrinth	p. 198
Samuel Beckett's vessels, voices and shades of the absurd	p. 215
In the wake of Kafka?	p. 215
The prose	p. 220
The drama	p. 226
Further shades of the absurd	p. 232
Flann O'Brien and the purloined absurd	p. 251
The hydra-headed man	p. 251
At Swim-Two-Birds: juvenile scrivenry as metafictional absurd?	p. 259
The Third Policeman: questions, mysteries, answers	p. 264
In conclusion
Beyond the absurd?	p. 280
The prosaic absurd	p. 280
Beyond the 'Theatre of the Absurd'?	p. 291
Popular culture	p. 299
That miscellaneous and ubiquitous absurd	p. 301
Conclusion	p. 309
Bibliography	p. 314
Index	p. 337
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

The absurd in literature

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

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