Jane Austen and Comedy / / ed. by Erin Goss.

• MitwirkendeR: Chung, Soha,; Dempsey, Sean,; Erwin, Timothy,; Goss, Erin,; Kramp, Michael,; Krueger, Misty,; Lindstrom, Eric,; Sigler, David,
• HerausgeberIn: Goss, Erin,
• Place / Publishing House: Lewisburg, PA : : Bucknell University Press, , [2021]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (250 p.) :; 6

Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen’s work. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Jane Austen and Comedy -- Contributors -- PART ONE : Comic Energy and Explosive Humor -- 1 Austen, Philosophy, and Comic Stylistics -- 2 Jane Austen: Comedy against Happiness -- 3 “Open-Hearted”: Persuasion and the Cultivation of Good Humor -- PART TWO : (Emma’s) Laughter with a Purpose -- 4 After the Laughter: Seeking Perfect Happiness in Emma -- 5 The Comic Visions of Emma Woodhouse -- PART THREE : Comedic Form, Comedic Effect -- 6 On Austen, Comedy, and Future Possibility -- 7 Lost in the Comedy: Austen’s Paternalistic Men and the Problem of Accountability -- 8 Sense, Sensibility, Sea Monsters, and Carnivalesque Caricature -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index