Framing Literary Humour: Cells, Masks and Bodies as 20th-Century Sites of Imprisonment - Softcover

Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501371991 ISBN 13: 9781501371998

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Synopsis

Contrary to what their oppressive design would lead us to believe, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour? Starting from the most obvious areas of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Framing Literary Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment. Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyses selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour.

About this title

About the Author

Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard teaches French and Francophone literatures at the University of Montréal and the University of Ottawa, Canada. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her work in comparative literature and humour studies has been supported by multiple scholarships and has received the Canadian Comparative Literature Association Esther Cheung Award (2017) and an Outstanding Presentation Award at the International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter (2016).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501371991
• ISBN 13: 9781501371998
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208