Comic Faith: The Great Tradition From Austen To Joyce
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when comedy becomes a form of belief? In Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, Robert M. Polhemus presents a groundbreaking argument that the great comic novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries — from Jane Austen to James Joyce — constructed a secular faith rooted in laughter, wit, and the redemptive power of humour, offering an alternative to the declining authority of organised religion in the modern age. Polhemus chronicles the works of literary titans including Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Carroll, Meredith, and Joyce, illustrating how each author wielded comedy not merely as entertainment but as a profound moral and spiritual vision. His argument is bold and meticulously evidenced, drawing on close textual analysis to reveal the theological undercurrents running through seemingly playful narratives. Written with scholarly rigour yet accessible eloquence, Comic Faith stands as an essential text in Victorian and Modernist literary criticism — one that will leave you questioning whether the joke, after all, might be the most serious thing in English literature.
Author: Robert M. Polhemus
Format: Paperback
Published: 1980, University of Chicago Press
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when comedy becomes a form of belief? In Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, Robert M. Polhemus presents a groundbreaking argument that the great comic novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries — from Jane Austen to James Joyce — constructed a secular faith rooted in laughter, wit, and the redemptive power of humour, offering an alternative to the declining authority of organised religion in the modern age. Polhemus chronicles the works of literary titans including Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Carroll, Meredith, and Joyce, illustrating how each author wielded comedy not merely as entertainment but as a profound moral and spiritual vision. His argument is bold and meticulously evidenced, drawing on close textual analysis to reveal the theological undercurrents running through seemingly playful narratives. Written with scholarly rigour yet accessible eloquence, Comic Faith stands as an essential text in Victorian and Modernist literary criticism — one that will leave you questioning whether the joke, after all, might be the most serious thing in English literature.