Download or read book Enter Rabelais Laughing written by Barbara C. Bowen and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553) is a difficult and often misunderstood author, whose reputation for coarse "Rabelaisian" jesting and "Gargantuan" indulgence in food, drink, and sex is highly misleading. He was in fact a committed humanist who expressed strong views on religion, good government, education, and much more through the mock-heroic adventures of his giants. While most books about Rabelais have relatively little to say about his comedic genius, Enter Rabelais, Laughing analyses the many sides of Rabelais's humor, focusing on why his writing was so hilariously funny to sixteenth-century readers. The author begins by discussing how the Renaissance defined laughter and situates Rabelais in a long tradition of literary laughter. Subsequent chapters examine specific contexts relevant to Gargantua and Pantagruel, beginning with the comic aspects of epic, chronicle, mock-epic, and farce, and proceeding to Renaissance and Reformation humanist satire, rhetoric, medicine, and law. All of these chapters combine information, much of it new, on the humanist message Rabelais wanted to convey to his readers, with an analysis of how he used his wit to reinforce his message. Rarely is a writer's work treated in such illuminating detail. On a broad level, Enter Rabelais, Laughing serves as an excellent introduction to French Renaissance literature and exhibits a remarkably charming and lucid writing style, free of jargon. To Rabelais scholars in particular it offers a thorough and innovative analysis that corrects misconceptions and questions commonly held views.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais written by John O'Brien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, readable account of Rabelais, his work, his thought and his world.
Download or read book Rabelais and His World written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.
Download or read book Rabelais written by Kathleen M. Hall and published by Foyles. This book was released on 1991 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Cultural History of Laughter written by Abílio Almeida and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-07 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is laughter a sin? Or is it man’s best medicine? Is laughter now trivialised, mechanised or even weaponised by contemporary media? This book explores the social history of laughter in the West, from classical antiquity to the present day. Engaging with a range of thought from Plato to Nietzsche, it moves from classical to modern thought, considering the changing emotional climate of societies – including the postmodern "dictatorship of happiness" – and the role played by the technological changes of the last century in shaping our interpretation of laughter. A broad, historical study of the physical and emotional aspects of laughter, as well as its social role, A Cultural History of Laughter will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and cultural studies, among other fields of knowledge.
Download or read book Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-09-22 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.
Download or read book Treatise On Laughter written by Laurent Joubert and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1980-06-30 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translation from French of an essay on the nature and character of human laughter Until its translation, Treatise on Laughter remained accessible solely to readers of French for nearly four centuries. Joubert’s treatise offers a curious and stimulating experience: the sensation of moving through another epistemology. His theory was composed during a period of great turmoil in the history of France when the human race was becoming much more aware of the organic structure of man and nature. He begins with the immediately observable phenomena before penetrating into the more hidden aspects of one of the most admirable of human acts, amirables accions de l’homme, laughter. Joubert is keenly aware of the difficulty of his subject matter. Rather than discouraging him, however, this becomes an incentive, making the study of such a formidable mystery more enticing. His ideas can appear quaint, and many of his beliefs can make us smile. Yet our smile may well disappear when we wonder which of today’s accepted ideas might seem laughable half a millennium hence.
Download or read book Making Philosophy Laugh written by Dustin Peone and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world. In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. He demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought.
Download or read book Laughter Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands written by Johan Verberckmoes and published by Springer. This book was released on 1999-03-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the modern age laughter raised passions and activated the body to sweat and shake. Derision was not distinguished from joy. Deceiving the senses by tricks or funny stories made all people laugh loudly, regardless of class. Johan Verberckmoes describes, in this innovating book, the hotchpotch of comic images and stories in 'Flandes' during the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs, from 1500 to 1700. It challenges the Bakhtinian idea of a caesura in the history of laughter around 1600.
Download or read book Literature and the Grotesque written by Michael J. Meyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-04-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sudden Glory written by Barry Sanders and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1996-10-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wonderful exploration of the meaning of laughter, Barry Sanders queries its uses from the ancient Hebrews to Lenny Bruce, turning up evidence of its age-old power to subvert authority and give voice to the voiceless.
Download or read book The Art of Humour in the Teatro Breve and Comedias of Calder n de la Barca written by Ted Lars Lennard Bergman and published by Tamesis Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frantic and popular characters and situations from the entremes tradition, thought by many as opposing the comedias' main features, are instead shown to join and often dominate these features through the introduction of absurd figuras, slapstick, and burlas."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Shakespeare Rabelais and the Comical historical written by Cathleen T. McLoughlin and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intertextual reading of William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I & II with François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel suggests that sufficient evidence exists to question the widespread denial of any knowledge of Rabelais on the part of Shakespeare. In each work, a prince participates in a process of education in preparation to succeed his father. Each prince shares adventures with an unconventional, comic companion. History and comedy form a hybrid genre, the Comical-Historical. Foundational chapters discuss the works of two other writers of hybridized genres, Lucian and Erasmus, as well as several visual artifacts of the time period. The figure of Socrates in a variety of guises appears in the work of the four writers. Shakespeare, this study suggests, extends the tradition established for the renaissance by Erasmus and augmented by Rabelais.
Download or read book Laughter At The Foot Of The Cross written by M.a. Screech and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Christian laughter is a maze: you could easily get snarled up within it." So says Michael A. Screech in his note to readers preceding this collection of fifty-three elegant and pithy essays. As Screech reveals, the question of whether laughter is acceptable to the god of the Old and New Testaments is a dangerous one. But we are fortunate in our gu
Download or read book Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds written by Donald Beecher and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds, Donald Beecher explores the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the brain as they affect the study of fiction. He builds upon insights from the cognitive sciences to explain how we actualize imaginary persons, read the clues to their intentional states, assess their representations of selfhood, and empathize with their felt experiences in imaginary environments. He considers how our own faculty of memory, in all its selective particularity and planned oblivion, becomes an increasingly significant dimension of the critical act, and how our own emotions become aggressive readers of literary experience, culminating in states which define the genres of literature. Beecher illustrates his points with examples from major works of the Renaissance period, including Dr Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Menaphon, The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, and The Moral Philosophy of Doni. In this volume, studies in the science of mind come into their own in explaining the architectures of the brain that shape such emergent properties as empathy, suspense, curiosity, the formation of communities, gossip, rationalization, confabulation, and so much more that pertains to the behaviour of characters, the orientation of readers, and the construction of meaning. Discussing a breadth of topics – from the mysteries of the criminal mind to the psychology of tears – Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds is the most comprehensive work available on the study of fictional worlds and their relation to the constitution of the human brain.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Humour History and Methodology written by Daniel Derrin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.
Download or read book The Rabelaisian Mythologies written by Max Gauna and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 4 examines in detail the various myths of the fourth book and suggests that in it Rabelais propounds a radically unorthodox syncretism in which the poetic attractions of Platonic and Plutarchan demonology are preponderant, in which Christ Himself may be seen as the greatest of the demons, and where the climax of the book shows us the hero Pantagruel in direct communication with his own guardian demon. A short epilogue sums up Gauna's conclusions and suggests reasons for the literary and philosophical attractions of magical Platonism.
