French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier

The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor.
In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vall�s and la blague; exaggeration in Vall�s and Cd'eline (Mort � credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les M�t�ores).
Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.