| French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier Contributor(s): Redfern, Walter (Author) |
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ISBN: 0199237573 ISBN-13: 9780199237579 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $81.70 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 2008 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - French - History | Europe - France - Philosophy | History & Surveys - Modern |
| Dewey: 840.917 |
| LCCN: 2008295353 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.7" W x 8.5" (0.95 lbs) 256 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - French |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor. In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vallès and la blague; exaggeration in Vallès and Cd'eline (Mort à credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Météores). Five interleaved riffs on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship. |