An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

by George Meredith

Overview

An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit is the most extensive work on the nineteenth century comic genre. It was initially presented as Meredith’s first and only public lecture in London in 1877, and published separately as a book in 1897.  In it, Meredith defines comedy as a “humour of the mind,” not prevalent in the British society of his day, which he saw as fraught with “Unreason and Sentimentalism.”  The work had a strong influence on writers such as Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, and is remarkable for discussing comedy within the context of the status of women and as a means for their advancement. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411464360
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	11/29/2011
Series:	Barnes & Noble Digital Library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	427 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

George Meredith (1828 –1909) was a English novelist and poet. His early novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) met with critical disapproval, but he had success with The Egoist (1879), a novel which combined comedy and psychology for the purposes of witty social criticism. The subjection of women, was a recurrent theme in his work and central in his most successful novel, Diana of the Crossways (1885). Meredith’s fifty-sonnet sequence about a loveless marriage, Modern Love (1862) was acclaimed for its candor about married life and for its extension of the sonnet form—each sonnet containing sixteen lines.