Victorian Comedy
and Laughter : Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent
- Submitting institution
-
Roehampton University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1496973
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 978-1-137-57881-5
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This submission comprises the edited book Victorian Comedy and Laughter, Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent (2020), which contains two texts that I sole authored: (i) the general introduction to the volume (‘Introduction: Victorian Comedy and Laughter – Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent’), and (ii) my chapter ‘George Eliot’s Jokes’. Together, these two texts establish paradigmatic new ways of thinking about Victorian comedy across three distinctly demarcated Victorian generations. In the Introduction, I also introduce an important new cultural figure who emerges from the 1850s onwards, and is in dialogue with the flâneur: the ‘Jokeur’, or the professional or semi-professional joke-writer. In my chapter, I discuss Eliot’s long-standing admiration for the controversial and iconoclastic German Romantic writer Heinrich Heine – who also provided the literary mainstay of Sigmund Freud’s work on the joke in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Focusing predominantly on four key novels and her critically-ignored essay for the Westminster Review, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (1856), I argue that while Eliot is perennially associated with long-form, understanding her celebration of the short-form of Heine’s jokes suggests new ways of thinking about realism and sympathy. In re-situating Eliot’s writing within the context of Victorian wit and humour (both dynamically changing categories in the period), I also introduce a new physiological concept, a ‘reality affect’ (as opposed to Barthes’s ‘Reality Effect’); a constantly renewing form of reading and re-reading that rests on what Nicholas Dames calls reading as ‘process rather than structure’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
