Stimulating, challenging, engaging, dauntingly well informed and
wide-ranging, Professor Redfern's revised book on puns offers
massive returns both to the specialist researcher and the
interested general reader. Taking his examples back to ancient
literatures, but drawing especially on English, American and French
cultures (popular and high), he defies the way in which the pun has
so often been denigrated as a poor relation within the family of
humorous modes, and his sparkling and inventive prose fully
justifies that approach. Every page offers original examples amid
material from his sources, tellingly examined but without the
dogmatic imposition of a preconceived (and therefore, perhaps,
inadequate) theory. That exclusion, criticised by earlier
reviewers, perceptibly enhances the chapters he presents, which
cover, among other matters, the psychology and psychopathology of
word-play, the history of punning (particularly enlightening on the
English 18th and 19th centuries, though Hugo, Flaubert and others
also figure strongly), how punning links with etymology, anagram,
neologism and rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, irony, litotes
and syllepsis, the commercialisation of puns in the advertising
industry and their exploitation by the press, and an intriguing
extension of wordplay into the visual as developed in film and TV,
as well as by artists like Arcimboldo and Duchamp.
General
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