Intricate Laughter in the Satire of Swift and PopeWhile the eighteenth century was a period in which satire flourished, many eighteenth-century writers felt considerable unease about the form, and about the laughter it produced. This book explores the intricate effects of satiric laughter, taking as its focus the satire of swift and Pope. Laughter is a weapon which excludes its victim not only from society but from the state of being human. At the same time laughter can achieve and strengthen group identity for those who are engaged in laughing, it is also frequently used as a weapon within society. The satirist, in encouraging laughter, reactivates and legitimizes his reader's childhood sense of play in order to secure endorsement of the satiric attack. The greatest satire however, transcends personal attack and brings the reader to affirm, through laughter, belief in the abiding worth of humankind. |
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Page 121
... faces and smiling becomes selective ' . The ' open - mouth ' smile remains , he argues , in ' true laughter ' and in the human ' play - face ' . These , then , are the questions with which van Hooff concludes his paper and which draw ...
... faces and smiling becomes selective ' . The ' open - mouth ' smile remains , he argues , in ' true laughter ' and in the human ' play - face ' . These , then , are the questions with which van Hooff concludes his paper and which draw ...
Page 122
... faces elicit smiling only when the infant is able to perceive the reappearing face in a pattern of repeated stimuli that is itself regarded as play ( the beginnings of peek - a - boo ) . By the crucial ' third or fourth month ' the ...
... faces elicit smiling only when the infant is able to perceive the reappearing face in a pattern of repeated stimuli that is itself regarded as play ( the beginnings of peek - a - boo ) . By the crucial ' third or fourth month ' the ...
Page 123
... face , which is distinguished as one of the infant's earliest perceived play patterns , coincides with the fact that it is the mother's ( or , if one is reading Darwin or Greig , the father's ) face that is the object of play . Each ...
... face , which is distinguished as one of the infant's earliest perceived play patterns , coincides with the fact that it is the mother's ( or , if one is reading Darwin or Greig , the father's ) face that is the object of play . Each ...
Contents
Laughter | 40 |
Laughter in Society | 82 |
The Playground of the Mind | 118 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
Addison adult apparently approval Arbuthnot aroused attack Beautiful Young Nymph behaviour Bergson Bickerstaff Brobdingnag Bruner Characteristics Charlesworth and Kreutzer child Cibber comic Corinna couplet Darwin death described Discourse Dryden Dunciad effect endorse Essay Examiner example expected expression eyes face feeling Freud genuine Gulliver Gulliver's Gulliver's Travels Hobbes Hobbesian Hooff Horace Houyhnhnms Huizinga human Humour ideal individual infant joke Jolly and Sylva Jonathan Swift judgment Juvenal kind Laing language laugh laughter Learning Leviathan Lock man's mankind mind moral nature numbers object observes ontologically secure particular Partridge Partridge's party passion pattern person perspective play pleasure poem poet Polite Conversation Pope Pope's proper Prose Writings R. D. Laing raillery Rape reader response ridiculous satiric victim satirist says secret freemasonry sense Sensus Communis Shaftesbury smile social society Spectator Steele Steele's super-ego Swift Tale Tatler thing true Verses W. B. Yeats Whig words Wotton Yahoo