This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century.
Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period:
* Antiquity and the Middle Ages
* The Renaissance
* Restoration to Romanticism
* The Industrial Age
* The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, S ren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North.
As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the
Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.
Ackerman, Alan: - Alan Ackerman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he also holds a joint-appointment in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. His books include Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (2011), Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar (2011), and The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (1999). He is the editor of Arthur Miller's Broken Glass (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2011). Since 2005, he has served as Editor of the journal Modern Drama.
Romanska, Magda: - Magda Romanska is Professor of Theatre and Media at Emerson College, Boston, MA, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and a Principal Researcher at Harvard metaLAB, where she researches the relationship between art, science, and technology. She is the author of five critically acclaimed scholarly books, including The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012); TheaterMachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (2020); Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2016); The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, a leading and best-selling handbook of dramaturgy, and she has contributed a chapter to Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen, 2019). As a playwright, she is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, the Mass Council Artist Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, the Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from the Time Warner Foundation, and PAHA Creative Arts Prize. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, and Cornell University.
