Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel

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Format: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 2003-10-01
Publisher(s): Palgrave Macmillan
List Price: $109.99

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Summary

Literary modernism traditionally focuses on the writings of self-consciously avant-garde writers who attempted to break with literary and aesthetic forms inherited from the nineteenth-century. This view of Modernism has overlooked much of the social comedy of the period, assessing it as satiric and therefore conservative, reinforcing the very cultural values it sets out to critique. Examining the work of Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell in light of psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humor, Colletta claims that dark humor is an important characteristic of Modernism.

Author Biography

Lisa Colletta, a writer and scholar from Southern California, is Assistant Professor of English at Babson College in Massachusetts. She has published on the work of I. Compton-Burnett, D.H. Lawrence, and John Fowles and is co-editor of Wild colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien. She is currently editing the letters of Christopher Isherwood to his mother and is at work on a book examining British novelists in Hollywood, entitled Voluntary Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-65.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Modernism and Dark Humor * Comic Theory, the Social Novel, and Freud * Criticizing the Social System: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's Dark Comedy of Manners * The Dark Domestic Vision of Ivy Compton-Burnett: A House and Its Head * The Too, Too Bogus World: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies * Astolpho Meets Sisyphus: Melancholy and Repetition in Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men *
Introduction: Modernism and Dark Humor * Comic Theory, the Social Novel, and Freud * Criticizing the Social System: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's Dark Comedy of Manners * The Dark Domestic Vision of Ivy Compton-Burnett: A House and Its Head * The Too, Too Bogus World: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies * Astolpho Meets Sisyphus: Melancholy and Repetition in Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men *

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