Comedy Matters From Shakespeare to Stoppard

Comedy Matterstraces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters,Comedy Mattersdemonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

William W. Demastes is Professor of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He is the author of numerous articles and books on theatre and drama, including Staging Consciousness, Theatre of Chaos, Beyond Naturalism, and Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, co-edited with Iris Smith Fischer.

Introduction: Into the Twenty-first Century	p. 1
The Organics of Comedy	p. 11
On the Razor's Edge: Between Comedy and Tragedy	p. 29
Connecting Mind to Body	p. 53
More than Matter Matters	p. 85
The Orderly Disorder of Comic Vitality and Its Liberating Potential	p. 103
Comedy as Gift	p. 127
Comedy Confronts Commodity via the Adaptive Unconscious	p. 153
Conclusion: Things Could Be Better, Things Could Be Worse	p. 179
Notes	p. 185
Bibliography	p. 193
Index	p. 199
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Comedy Matters From Shakespeare to Stoppard

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials