The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique

Front Cover
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 287 pages
One of the few constants in Western critical though for over twomillennia has been the inexhaustible fascination with comedy: what itis and how it works. Yet comedy has eluded every definition. Why haveso many of the leading critics and philosophers of the West proposedtheories and counter-theories of comedy while often admitting that itenthralls and baffles the mind in equal measure? The Idea of Comedy: A Critique assembles a rich corpus of materials from differentlanguages and eras to construct a history of the commentaries andreflections, the theoretical postulates and conjectures, and the oftenacrimonious debates about comedy through the centuries from Platoand Aristotle to our contemporaries
 

Contents

From Classical to Modern The Arc from Ethical to Social Conceptions
23
The Classical Attitude
24
The Renaissance Attitude and After
31
Early Modernist Theory
42
Theory and Resistance
55
The Dominant Modernist Conception of Comedy Premises and Elisions
64
Modernist Residua of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
66
The Dominant Satiric NeoAristotelian View
83
The Medieval Fool Tradition
150
Fooling Theory
162
The Interlude of Postmodernist Conceptions
173
Late Century Overview
174
The Ludic Terrain of Postmodern Theory
193
Comedy in Contemporary Thought
205
The Butts of Reason
217
The Return of Systems and Aesthetics
232

The Legacy of the Dominant Through 2000
98
The Late Modernist Conception of Comedy Premises and Elisions
109
The Emergent Populist Theory
110
The Comic Hero and Modernist Legacies
120
Twin Modernist Elisions
143
The Contemporary Idea of Comedy
247
The Idea of Comedy
253
Comedy as an Idea
259
Reference List
267
Index
279

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