Techniques of Satire

E-273: De Gruyter Mouton. Very Good. 1994. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin & New York. 1994. Xxiii, 213 pgs. Humor Research: 2. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities (boards are bowed with some sticker shadow present to the front board). No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. What evokes laughter? Why is something funny? As readers, we frequently pose such questions. Literary scholars more often than not, however, try to pass these questions on to their colleagues in other fields--to philosophers, psychologists and sociologists. And yet, the comic in literature possesses its own system of rules and devices, that is to say, the poetics of the comic. Emil Draitser analyses the devices that make literary works funny. Notions of the comic and of laughter advanced by thinkers as diverse as Bergson, Freud, and Koestler provide the necessary theoretical framework for his consideration of Saltykov-Shchedrin. Draitser's book also represents the first monograph in English on this major nineteenth-century satirist. EB; Humor Research [Hr]; 9.1 X 6.4 X 0.6 inches; 240 pages .