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Comedy: A Very Short Introduction

Matthew Bevis

20 December 2012

ISBN: 9780199601714

176 pages
Paperback
174x111mm

In Stock

Very Short Introductions

Price: £8.99

With a broad scope across the millennia, from high literature to popular culture, between page and stage and screen, this Very Short Introduction considers comedy not only as a literary genre, but also as a broader impulse at work in many other historical and contemporary forms of satire, parody, and play.

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Description

With a broad scope across the millennia, from high literature to popular culture, between page and stage and screen, this Very Short Introduction considers comedy not only as a literary genre, but also as a broader impulse at work in many other historical and contemporary forms of satire, parody, and play.

  • Explores many different forms of comedy from the Greeks to the present
  • Takes examples from both high and low culture, and from several different literatures and languages
  • Develops a comparitive approach which allows comic theory and practice to shed new light upon one another
  • Offers both close readings and broad overviews of comic styles, tropes and impulses
  • Written in a witty and engaging style
  • Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over five million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Matthew Bevis, Fellow in English, Keble College, University of Oxford

Matthew Bevis is a Fellow in English at Keble College, University of Oxford. His publications include Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Some Versions of Empson, ed. (OUP, 2007), and The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his research in 2007.

Table of Contents

    Introduction
    1:In the beginning...
    2:In and out of character
    3:Plotting mischief
    4:Underdogs
    5:Getting physical
    6:Taking liberties
    7:Beyond a joke
    8:Endgames
    Conclusion

Reviews

"Insightful, witty and impressively wide-ranging throughout" - Times Literary Supplement

"Bevis shows there's no iron rule that a book on comedy can't be entertaining" - Independent i

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