Book
The irresponsible self : on laughter and the novel
Edition
1st ed.
Publication Information
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Physical Description
viii, 312 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
Contents
- Introduction : comedy and the irresponsible self --Don Quixote's Old and New Testaments
- Shakespeare and the pathos of rambling
- How Shakespeare's 'irresponsibility' saved Coleridge
- Dostoevsky's God
- Isaac Babel and the dangers of exaggeration
- Saltykov-Shchedrin's subversion of hypocrisy
- Anna Karenina and characterisation
- Italo Svevo's unreliable comedy
- Giovanni Verga's comic sympathy
- Joseph Roth's empire of signs
- Bohumil Harabal's comic world
- J.F. Powers and the priests
- Hysterical realism
- Jonathan Franzen and the 'social novel'
- Tom Wolfe's shallowness and the problem of information
- Salman Rushdie's nobu novel
- Monica Ali's novelties
- Saul Bellow's comic style
- Real Mr. Biswas
- V.S. Pritchett and English comedy
- Henry Green's England.