Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

Daniel Derrin is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He has held research and teaching fellowships in Australia and the UK and has published widely on early modern literature and on humour.Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has edited and translated the Old Norse riddle corpus for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, and her publications include articles on the relationship between the riddles and Norse mythological poetry.

• Part I: Preliminaries: terms and theories.- 1. Introduction- Daniel Derrin.- 2.The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the limits of Method- Conal Condren.- 3.No Sense of Humour? ‘Humour’ Words in Old Norse- Hannah Burrows.- 4. Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe- Lucy Rayfield.- 5. The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes.- 6. Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy- Jessica Milner Davis.- 7.Comic Character and Counter-violation: Critiquing Benign Violation Theory- Daniel Derrin.- 8. Humour and Religion: New Directions?- Richard A. Gardner.- Part II: Case studies.- 9. Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550-350 BC): Three Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture- Alexandre Mitchell.- 10.  Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China- Giulia Baccini.- 11. Testing the Limits of Pirandello’s Umorismo: a Case Study Based on Xiaolin Guangji- Antonio Leggieri.- 12. The Monsters that Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology- Rafał Borysławski.- 13. Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to Power- Martha Bayless.- 14. ‘Lightness and Maistrye’: Herod, Humour and Temptation in Early English Drama- Jamie Beckett.- 15. Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities- Alison Williams.- 16.Naïve Parody in Rabelais- John Parkin.- 17.‘By God’s Arse’: Genre, Humour and Religion in William Wager’s Moral Interludes- Lieke Stelling.- 18.Romantic Irony: Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and Carlyle- Giles Whiteley.- 19. Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Cartoons- Ronald Stewart.- 20. Popular Humour in Nordic Jesting Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Danish Recordings of Oral Song Tradition- Lene Halskov Hansen.- 21. Spanish Flu: The First Modern Case of Viral Humour?- Nikita Lobanov.- Part III: Humour of the Past in the Present.- 22.Translating Humour in The Song of Roland- John DuVal.- 23.Intercultural and Interartistic Transfers of Shandean Humour in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries- Yen-Mai Tran-Gervat.- 24. The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial’naja istorija? The challenge of Translating Eighteenth-century Chinese Irony and Grotesque for Contemporary Western Audiences- Anna Di Toro.- 25.Putting Humour on Display- Laurence Grove.- 26.Building The Old Joke Archive- Bob Nicholson and Mark Hall.