Nonsense

From a comic strip papyrus dating from Egypt's New Kingdom to the works of Stein Joyce and Barth nonsense texts reveal a set of possibilities as rich and complex as the more conventional system of making sense from which they are derived. Examining palindromes children's rhymes puns anagrams code languages and other texts Susan Stewart explores the labyrinthine relationships between common sense and nonsense-- and presents an original contribution to the fields of folklore literary theory anthropology and sociology by analyzing nonsense within an expansive context of the social manufacture of order and disorder.