French Laughter

The culmination of a lifetime''s fascination with humor in all its forms this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor. In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics including: Diderot viewed as a laughing philosopher mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets Le Neeu de Rameau and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness corraling Rousseau Sade the Christian God and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans in both his avatars Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours Sac au dos and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert Queneau and Beckett; Vall?s and la blague; exaggeration in Vall?s and Cd''eline (Mort ? credit and L''Enfant); the fiction plays and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier''s fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les M?t?ores). Five interleaved riffs on laughter dreams black humor politics and taste carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.