Nonfiction · 1877
An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit
Meredith asks what comedy is for, and answers that it is a corrective — the Comic Spirit hovering overhead, watching men and women behave absurdly and answering them with thoughtful laughter rather than with the coarse guffaw of farce or the contempt of satire. He works through Aristophanes, Menander, Molière, Congreve and the Restoration stage, argues that a society only produces good comedy when its women are educated enough to be treated as equals in the conversation, and distinguishes carefully between humour, satire, irony and the comic.
George Meredith delivered the essay as a lecture at the London Institution in 1877 and published it that year; it appeared as a book in 1897. It is the most influential English statement of a theory of comedy, and it underlies his own novels.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete essay.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
Adjacent records
