A Cultural history of humour : from antiquity to the present day / edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bremmer, Jan N.

Roodenburg, Herman.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wit and humor--History and criticism.

Wit and humor.

Physical Description:

xii, 264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Polity Press ; Malden, MA : Blackwell, 1997.

Summary:

This important and highly original book sets out to explore the terra incognita of humour through the ages - from jokes and stage humour in Greece and Rome to the jestbooks of early modern Europe, from practical jokes in Renaissance Italy to comic painting during the Dutch Golden Age, from Bakhtin's conception of laughter to the joking relationships of anthropologists.

Contents:

Humor and history / Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg

Jokes, jokers and jokebooks in ancient Greek culture / Jan Bremer

Cicero, Plautus and Roman laughter / Fritz Graf

Laughter in the Middle Ages / Jacques le Goff

Bakhtin and his theory of carnival / Aaron Gurevich

Frontiers of the comic in early modern Italy, c. 1350-1750 / Peter Burke

The comic and the Counter-Reformation in the Spanish Netherlands / Johan Verberckmoes

Prose jest-books mainly in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in England / Derek Brewer

To converse agreeably, civility and the telling of jokes in the seventeenth-century Holland / Herman Roodenburg

How was Jan Steen funny? / Mariët Westermann

Parliamentary hilarity inside the French Constitutional Assembly (1789-91) / Antoine de Baecque

Humour and the public sphere in nineteenth-century Germany / Mary Lee Townsend

Humour, laughter and the field, reflections from anthropology / Henk Driessen.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [242]-252) and indexes.

ISBN:

0745618804

OCLC:

36215011