The idea of comedy : history, theory, critique /

Hokenson (classics, French, comparative literature, and women's studies, Florida Atlantic Univ.) is dead serious about comedy, and here she traces the history of its criticism and explores the interface between societies and their "construction" of "the comic." Unlike Umberto Ecco, who uses humor to explore comedy in The Name of the Rose and Misunderstandings, Hokenson prefers to construct a weighty, scholarly, sweeping historical perspective, and from this vantage point she examines critical theorists from Aristotle and Aristophanes to Freud, Bergson, and Elaine Scary. Several chapters, for example, "Twin Modernist Elisions," engage in modish modernist bashing, but in other chapters Hokenson uncovers what she calls "the butts" of subjectivity and reason. The epilogue is a tour de force, summarizing the last 15 extraordinarily productive years of comic theory. A good complement to V. Ulea's A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type (2002), Susan Purdie's Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (1993), M. S. Silk's Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (2000), and James McGlew's Citizens on Stage (2002), this book is eloquent and precise on classical literature. It travels two and a half millennia, over acres of literatures, a trip that those with stamina will undertake and enjoy. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. H. Solomon formerly, University of Alberta