The period between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is often characterized as the age of extremes—while this era witnessed unprecedented violence and loss of human life, it also saw a surge in humorous entertainment in both democratic and authoritarian societies. The Politics of Humour examines how works such as satirical magazines and comedy films were used both to reaffirm group identity and to exclude those who did not belong.The essays in this collec...

Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Wa...

Children naturally like to hear about other children. They can identify with another child wherever the other kid happens to live. This allows them to imagine themselves in another country when they read about others. The children can see and experience famous places, exotic food and foreign practices. In other words, it gives them all the excitement of travel without the expense of actually hopping on a plane or train.

Mark Twain's 'On Masturbation' is a thought-provoking and controversial essay that delves into the taboo topic of self-pleasure. Written in Twain's signature satirical and humorous style, the book challenges societal norms and sheds light on the psychological and physiological effects of masturbation. Twain's witty observations and clever wordplay make this essay a compelling read for those interested in exploring human sexuality in a literary context. This book, although deemed controvers...

Immortal Comedy is the first book to 'think' philosophically about the comic phenomenon in general. Although author Agnes Heller had written a book that is both deeply scholarly and meditative on the subject of the comic form in film, literature, and life her writing is eminently approachable. In both its subject and style, Immortal Comedy is a seminal book. In it, Heller takes us on a journey through theories of comedy beginning with classical thought. She then detours through foundationa...

This book is the first monograph in English that comprehensively examines the ways in which Italian historical crime novels, TV series, and films have become a means to intervene in the social and political changes of the country. This study explores the ways in which fictional representations of the past mirror contemporaneous anxieties within Italian society in the work of writers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Lucarelli, Francesco Guccini, Loriano Macchiavelli, Marce...

"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the b...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world’s religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius, and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and Enlightenment essays and philosophical texts, together with the inherent skepticism about life after death in tragicomedies by Plautus, Shakespeare, Molière, and nineteenth-century novels by such as Dickens and Hugo, the literary critic and...

This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a...

The Collected Parody and Humor Prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald gathers the author's comic sketches, burlesques, playful essays, and satirical pastiches, revealing a writer whose wit was as central to his art as his lyric melancholy. These pieces illuminate Fitzgerald's command of voice, social observation, and literary mimicry, placing him within the vibrant magazine culture of the 1910s and 1920s, where parody, topical comedy, and urbane satire shaped public taste. Beneath the lightness lies...

Taking as its point of departure The Odyssey, Plato’s account of Atlantis and The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, this book examines the profound influence of these works on the development of island fiction as a genre specific to English literature. Close readings of island fictions from the past four centuries reveal the many ways in which they adapt, rewrite and refer back to these foundational texts, forming an important and intriguing literary tradition. Examples of t...

After establishing a feminist-historicist perspective on the tradition of biblical commentary, Tinkle develops in-depth case studies that situate scholars reading the bible in three distinct historical moments, and in so doing she exposes the cultural pressures that medieval scholars felt as they interpreted the bible.