The idea of comedy : history, theory, critique
"The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique assembles a rich corpus of materials from different languages and eras to construct a history of the commentaries and reflections, the theoretical postulates and conjectures, and the often acrimonious debates about comedy through the centuries from Plato and Aristotle to our contemporaries. The aim is dual: to situate comic theories in their historical moment, as participants in the wider intellectual currents of their time, and to trace underlying types of consensus and dispute running through different theories and intellectual generations. The book brings into view the full landscape of comic theory as a field of ideas, a terrain of thought extending from antique to recent conceptions."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2006
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison [N.J.], ©2006
Criticism, interpretation, etc
287 pages ; 25 cm
9780838640968, 0838640966
60742123
From classical to modern: the arc from ethical to social conceptions. The classical attitude
The Renaissance attitude and after
Early modernist theory
Theory and resistance
The dominant modernist conception of comedy: premises and elisions
Modernist residua of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
The dominant satiric, neo-Aristotelian view
The legacy of the dominant through 2000
The late modernist conception of comedy: premises and elisions. The emergent populist theory
The comic hero and modernist legacies
Twin modernist elisions. The slippage between neo-Aristotelian and populist views
Elision in theory: the medieval fool tradition
Fooling theory
The interlude of postmodernist conceptions. Late century overview
The Ludic terrain of postmodern theory
Comedy in contemporary thought. The butts of subjectivity
The butts of reason
The return of systems and aesthetics
Epilogue: the contemporary idea of comedy. The contemporary retrospective
The idea of comedy
Comedy as an idea