Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel: Triumph of Narcissism [Hardcover]

Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of Modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers from the period, and asks probing questions about the relationship between a dark humour that 'revels in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness' and the historical and social circumstances of the period. Colletta makes a compelling argument that probing deeply into the nature of humour or satire that define these 'social comedies' brings to light a more complex, and more accurate, understanding of the social changes and historical circumstances that define the modern era.Comic Theory, the Social Novel, and Freud Criticizing the Social System: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's Dark Comedy of Manners The Dark Domestic Vision of Ivy Compton-Burnett: A House and Its Head The Too, Too Bogus World: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies Astolpho Meets Sisyphus: Melancholy and Repetition in Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men

A work filled with breadth, depth, and savvy. - Regina Barreca, University of Connecticut

A fresh, confident new voice in the field of twentieth-century literary studies - one that deserves close critical attention for its intelligence, mastery over sources, and sense of humor. - Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University

Lisa Colletta expands our understanding of literary and cultural modernism in this insightful and trenchant study of dark humor in twentieth century British literature between the world wars. In refreshingly readable prose that is both lively and penetrating, Colletta's probing analysis of the novels of Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton Burnett, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell reveals that the comedic mode, however anarchic and subversive, is crucial for the

survival of the individual, and never more so thanl£3