French Laughter - Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier (Hardcover)

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; Valles and la blague; exaggeration in Valles and Cd'eline (Mort a 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 Meteores).
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.

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	February 2008
First published:	April 2008
Authors:	Walter Redfern
Dimensions:	223 x 146 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-923757-9
Categories:	Books > Sport & Leisure > Humour > General Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900 Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Area / regional studies > General
LSN:	0-19-923757-3
Barcode:	9780199237579

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