The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique

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Fairleigh Dickinson University 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

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Contents

Acknowledgments
9
Twin Modernist Elisions
143
The Interlude of Postmodernist Conceptions
173
Copyright

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