"Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. Comic Faith is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come."—John Halperin, Modern Fiction Studies

Winner, 2007 University & College Designers Association Design Award

Nobody says Shakespeare is dead, Antonio Fava tells us, but Commedia, they say, is dead. Why? Because clearly, he goes on, we have Shakespeare's texts, but nobody knows what to do with the improvisation that is the basis of the Commedia dell'Arte, despite massive documentation. This book by Fava, one of the few living master teachers of Commedia dell'Arte, is the first aesthetic and methodological study of the traditional Italian theater form--the first to describe, in a precise and practical way, what Commedia is and what it should be.

The mask--as object, symbol, character, theatrical practice, even spectacle itself--is the central metaphor around which Fava builds his discussion of structure, themes, characters, and methods. Drawing on twenty years of research conducted through his work as performer, director, mask maker, and scholar, he offers extensive practical, philosophical, and technical guidelines to performing the stock characters of Commedia, observing its structure, extracting its poetics, exploring its themes, and using the mask. A densely layered text combining historical fact, personal experience, philosophical speculation, and passionate opinion, and including copious illustrations--period drawings, prints, and color photographs of leather Commedia masks made by Fava himself--The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte is a rich work of singular insight into one of the world's most venerable forms of theater.

Can we rediscover the wildness in Mark Twain's humor? Can we understand how that wildness helped make him a national legend and a key figure in the expression of an American self? Bruce Michelson writes about Twain as a body of literature, as a public personality, and as a myth. He shows that many of Twain's most ambitious and memorable works, from the very beginning to the end of his career, express a drive for absolute liberation from every social, psychological, and artistic limit.

The outrageous and anarchic sides of Twain play a vital role in his art. But these traits are undervalued even by his admirers, who often favor clean shapes and steady affirmations in Twain's writing - not the dangerous comic outbreak, or the deep yearning to free the self from every definition and confinement.

Reviewing works from a wide range of Twain's writings, Michelson brings to light those wild dimensions, their literary consequences, and their cultural importance.

In Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings, Don Florence explains that Samuel Clemens did more than use the borrowed name of Mark Twain to sign his writings. He also developed a separate identity, or persona, becoming "a literary personality in his own right."

Challenging mainstream Twain criticism on many fronts, Florence focuses exclusively on Twain's early writings. He demonstrates how Twain evolved in his early narratives into the "Mark Twain" we now recognize. Florence maintains that this process was evolutionary: Although Twain might have been dependent on Clemens for the initial experiences, they become Twain's experiences, necessary for his development as a persona. Traditionally, critics of Twain have been preoccupied with dualities, but Florence sees this emphasis upon polarities as an oversimplification. He argues that much of Twain's humor strives to shape more and more of the world, giving Twain multiple narrative voices and letting him be inclusive, not exclusive.

Finally, this study asserts that there is more continuity to Mark Twain's career than has been generally recognized. Many Twain scholars have argued that Twain's later writings are radically different from his earlier writings because of their emphasis upon illusion and dream. Florence argues that the preoccupation with illusion and fantasy is scarcely new. Whether Twain's mood is exuberant or dark, he emphasizes subjectivity over objectivity, the dominance of fantasy, the creative powers of humor, and his ability as persona to determine what we consider "reality." Florence contends that Twain's early writings show Mark Twain gradually evolving into a masterfully comic persona.

Jargon-free and eloquently written, Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings provides a fascinating look at Mark Twain's developing genius and will be a welcome addition to Twain literature.

R. Howard Bloch argues that medieval French comic tales are shocking not so much for their dirty words, scatology, and celebration of the body in all its concavities and protrusions, but moreso for their insistent exposure of the scandal of their own production. Looking first at fabliaux about poets, Bloch demonstrates that the medieval comic poet was highly conscious of the inadequacy of language and pushed this perception to its logical, scandalous limit. The comic function of the fabliaux was intentionally disruptive: anticlerical, antifeminist, and antiestablishment, these tales were part of a sophisticated culture's critical perspective on itself.

By showing how the medieval poet's obsession with the outrageous, the low, and the lewd was intimately bound to poetry, Bloch forces a revision of traditional approaches to Old French literature. His final chapter, on castration anxiety, fetishism, and the comic, links the fabliaux with the development of modern notions of the self and makes a case for the medieval roots of our own sense of humor.

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression.

Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald.

The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Challenging the sentimentalized and moralized view of comedy that prevails in modern criticism, Christopher Herbert outlines a theory of comedy as a mode whose dominant motive and function is the glorification of pleasure. Using this model, he presents a detailed study of Anthony Trollope that sharply contradicts the persistent image of this novelist as a conventional writer and complacent spokesman for middle-class pieties.

The comic mode as Herbert describes it was antagonistic to the repressive moral ethos widely prevalent in Victorian England. Herbert shows how Trollope, under a mask of self-proclaimed conventionality, employed this mode in a steady, sometimes scandalous critique of the Victorian subversion of pleasure. Drawing on Trollope's unpublished notes on seventeenth-century drama and bringing to light many instances in the novels of direct borrowings from old plays, Herbert demonstrates the inventiveness and subtlety of Trollope's deployment of comic materials. Thematically organized around such subjects as Trollope's investigations of sex, his formal structures, and his principles of "realism," Herbert's study includes detailed readings of two of the nineteenth century's most ambitious exercises in comedy: The Way We Live Now and Trollope's neglected masterpiece, Ayala's Angel.

Of primary importance for readers of Trollope and students of comedy, Herbert's study will also prove valuable to those interested more generally in Victorian and modern fiction and the cultural history of the Victorian age.

“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage,” William Hazlitt recalled, “He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.” Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know—and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy.

Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.