Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930  investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of  Schadenfreude , and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these