Verlag:
Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt a.M.
This book attempts an innovative exploration of the connection between humour and scepticism in the English literary canon. Defining humour as a capability, or better put, as a dunamis, it looks into its 'energeiac' forms of actualisation in the...
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This book attempts an innovative exploration of the connection between humour and scepticism in the English literary canon. Defining humour as a capability, or better put, as a dunamis, it looks into its 'energeiac' forms of actualisation in the English literary imagination from Chaucer to Sterne. Cover -- HalfTitle -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Table of Contents -- List of abbreviations -- Epigraph -- Introduction: "What do you find so amusing Democritus?": Comedy, The English Dunamis, and The Poetics of Sceptical Humour -- I. (Un)Taming of the Shrew: Humour, Comedy, and the Tragic Discourse -- II. 'Dunamic' Encounters: Humour and Human Capabilities -- III. The English Dunamis and Humour -- IV. English Humour and Scepticism: A Nominalist Trajectory -- Chapter I: Mindful Mirth: The Onto-Medicinal Origins of Humour and Its Cognitive Afterlives -- I. The Ontological Argument -- II. The Medical Argument -- III. The Cognitive Argument -- Chapter II: "O Humour, Thou whose Name is known / To Britain's favor'd Isle alone": The Matter of L'humour anglais and Sceptic Upheavals -- I. The English Vein of Humour -- II. Sprouts of Doubt: English Humour and Scepticism -- Chapter III: "Certaynly We Ben Deceyved!": Ockhamite Scepticism and Trajectories of Poetic Humour in Chaucer's House of Fame -- Chapter IV: "The Blacke Poyson of Suspect": Hobbesian Transitions in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour -- Chapter V: Farewell to Reason: Humean Scepticism and the Contingent Humour of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy -- Conclusion: Quo Vadis, Humour? On the Sceptical Potential of English Humour and Its Nominalist Frontiers -- Bibliography.
