The Terrain of Comedy (Studies in Genre)

In THE TERRAIN OF COMEDY, Louise Cowan & her colleagues in the Dallas school of critics present a thorough probing of comedy as one of the territories through which the soul must journey, an "encompassing image" manifest in every culture. In the Introduction Cowan sets forth her theory of genres as embodying certain complex attitudes of the soul. Cowan points out that these essayists "would agree that comedy represents one of the major spatializations of reality of which literature is capable, (they) would not limit its presence to drama, & would view individual examples of comedy as representations of an order in reality..." Cowan explains further that "though there lies behind these essays a more or less shared theory of comedy, the essays themselves are, in general, exercises in practical rather than theoretical criticism. That is, they examine specific comic elements or themes & specific comic literary works or groups of works. They make no attempt at completeness. What the essays do, however, is to adumbrate the comic terrain..." Works interpreted include Homer's "Odyssey," Aristophanes' comedies, Genesis, "The Divine Comedy," & works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, & Faulkner.Louise Cowan (Editor) is the author of 'The Terrain of Comedy (Studies in Genre)', published 2011 under ISBN 9780911005059 and ISBN 0911005056.