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The Wunderhorn songs, and the symphonies that draw on them, are discussed in relation to the idea of Humor as understood in romantic literature (especially Jean Paul) as an inverted form of the sublime and also to the idea of the carnivalesque as understood by Bakhtin. Both are related to the idea of irony in Mahler's music and explored through considering the tone with which his music speaks—in both the Wunderhorn songs and the symphonies. The chapter also explores the extent to which Mahler's music is constituted from borrowed voices, understood both as allusions to other historical styles as well as more direct echoes of the music of other composers. Incidences of quotation are rare in Mahler and are much less important than his weaving together of plural stylistic idioms.

The chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Lutherstadt Wittenberg from 2004-2006, during the city’s two annual Reformation festivals (Reformation Day and Luther’s Wedding). The theoretical framework informing the chapter derives from ritual studies and performance theory; a broad assumption is that cultural performances are occasions of social-cultural reflexivity, negotiation, and even contest. The focus of the paper is on-the-ground tensions and implications surrounding the carnivalesque nature of Wittenberg’s contemporary Luther festivals. Carnival was virtually eliminated in Protestant Europe by 1800. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, Carnival has returned to European popular culture with a vengeance—and it has recently returned to Wittenberg, the heartland of German Protestantism—not as Carnival proper, but as festive celebration informed by the carnivalesque: costuming, satire, mockery, fools, masks, inversion, theatrical skits in the streets, folktales, dances, drum and pipe music. It is argued that contemporary carnivalesque festivity is a mimetic return to early modern and Renaissance era popular culture in order to critique official or high culture, process the dramatic social-cultural changes in the East in the wake of reunification, and inscribe popular values and sentiments into social life through public enactment.

This chapter discusses the carnivalesque, which is one of jazz's “lower” manifestations, and is largely derived from literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin believed that the carnivalesque can help people understand or make sense of the improper outbursts in the supposedly serious setting of recent jazz, while it also reveals other meanings and practices which are common throughout the genre. The chapter focuses on several sounds and images offered by the band Sex Mob, and shows how a carnivalesque aesthetic still persists in modern times to stop the severe, elitist, or solipsistic attitudes of modern jazz.

More than a vulgar parody of “real” sport, professional wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the transgressive, violent urges generally repressed in everyday life. More than a staged fight between representatives of good and evil, at its heart is a Rabelaisian carnival, an invitation to every participant to share in expressions of excess and to celebrate the desire for, if not the acting upon, transgression against whatever cultural values are perceived as dominant and/or oppressive in everyday life. More than an elaborate con game in which spectators are seduced into accepting the illusion of “real” violence, wrestling activates and authorizes its audiences, makes them complicit in the performance. Matches can be described in conventional dramatic terms that remain consistent whether in Madison Square Garden or Gleason’s Arena. Because the fight is fixed, the contest is for heat—for the fans’ attention—rather than for victory per se.

Professional wrestling’s play of masculinity is profoundly carnivalesque as it affirms and mocks, celebrates and critiques prevailing definitions of what it is to be a “real” man in contemporary American culture. Because it is centered on, and always returns to, the display of male bodies, and because the action is both a simulation and a parody of violence between men, the performance is always highly ambivalent and profoundly transgressive, at once hypervisible and hypermasculine. As professional wrestlers mask their profound dependence upon and cooperation with each other in the ring, so too they perform a denial of intimacy, even as their performances are exceptionally, provocatively intimate. Despite its apparent social subversiveness, in the end, professional wrestling affirms the dominant culture; it is always a performance by men, for men, about men. Both its ethos and its aesthetics are explicitly centered on the idea of masculinity at once essential and performed.

Based on similarities in Mikhail Bakhtin's and Carl Gustav Jung's ideas about dialogism, this chapter discusses the inclusion of sequences featuring heterogenic audio-visual media of conspicuously lower quality – the shooting of a film, TV reportage, a home video – in representative selection of films by veteran Romanian directors Mircea Daneliuc and Lucian Pintilie, as well as in films by Corneliu Porumboiu and Gabriel Achim from the New Romanian Cinema generation. The chapter then argues that the resultant intermedial carnivalesque, or trickster narrative, is facilitated by a Trickster figure, usually a director's stand-in of ambiguous cultural, ideological and ethical repute. This self-reflexive and meta-médiatique versatility of Trickster narratives, the chapter concludes, have proven time and again to be superb vehicles for cinematic encoding, which explains the fascination of Romanian film auteurs with tricksterish re-enactments and intermedial carnivalesque.

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

Chapter 2 analyzes Tunisian writer and critic Abdelwahab Meddeb’s (1946–2014) wildly experimental 1979 novel Talismano. The labyrinthine text takes the reader on a hallucinatory journey through Tunisia’s topography—historical and contemporary, imagined and mythical—through a multitude of languages, temporalities, and religious discourses. The story presciently traces the evolution of a popular rebellion as it winds its way through the cityscape of Tunis’s medina bearing a retinue of prophets, artisans, sorceresses, alchemists, and prostitutes. The chapter examines Meddeb’s polemical attack on Bourguiba-era Tunisia, in which hegemonic power is simultaneously concentrated in state and religious institutions. Talismano subsequently demonstrates the co-constitutional nature of religious and state epistemologies, as well as their attendant institutions and discourses. The novel counteracts these forces in its rescripting of the Qurʾan, as well as its invocation of Sufi figures, texts, and rituals. The chapter contextualizes Talismano’s Sufi poetics within the Meddeb’s polemical critical writings against “orthodox” Sunni Islam.

A transmigration of the spirit bespeaks a transgenerational disposition toward collectively indulging in a multiplicity of transcendent ludic ideations. In the context of Boxing Day, colloquially, “spirit” betokens a force that generates inner energy, personal power, and an affective life itself. Transmigration speaks to the movement of spirit into physical embodiments rendering them more alive—high spirited. In other words, there is a transmigration of the spirit: literally and vernacularly speaking, “The spirit moves.”

The conclusion, “From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque” is one of reflection and projection. As island communities fragment, practitioners no longer seek just the carnivalesque psychic release but support obligatory rituals, directed at enculturating their young in the face of injustice and oppression. For many the perpetuation and preservation of Gombeys, Junkanoos, as well as J’ouvert fulfill time-honored practices conducive to exhibiting cultural politics with the possibility for social change. Dialectically speaking, locals view their living cultural traditions as an industry but not just for the sake of commodification but for the sake of each consummated ritualized moment, unleashing a cyclical spirit that lasts year-round.

A strong belief in the countercultural agency of literary texts is one of the defining features of Romanticism, as evidenced in concepts ranging from the Wordsworthian ‘High Argument’ to Percy B. Shelley’s claim that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Byron inhabits a unique position among his contemporaries: hearkening back to Whig ideals of restoration and looking forward to a more sceptical, less ideological world view. An analysis of his working relationship with Leigh Hunt and critique of Hunt’s use of ‘System’ amply demonstrates that Byron’s involvement in Romantic counterculture is characterised by techniques that are less involved in the vehement promotion of social change, but move in an equilibrium between agency and epistemology.

The violent conclusion to the book of Esther has regularly resulted in interpretations in a ‘funny’/‘un‐funny’ bisection of the book. However, reading the book of Esther as farce and as a literary carnival, a form called carnivalesque, offers readings that hold the book together. The comedy of farce, with its over‐the‐top violence, and of carnivalesque, in its reliance on the grotesque, are ideal lenses through which to read the violent, grotesque, hilarious story of Esther. Esther is a story of survival, and the comedy of Esther aids that survival. As Esther does her saving work within the ‘system’, a system that ultimately replaces her with Mordecai, and, furthermore, as Esther herself replaces the system‐resistant Vashti, feminist critique has often preferred the latter over the former. Esther does much for her own people; feminist critique wishes she could have done more for her own gender as well.

This chapter discusses carnivalesque and carnival tales. For many theorists and writers, the Venetian carnival represented many seasons in Venice society. For the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnival was a glimpse of authentic human freedom, a utopia still recoverable whenever carnival laughter united the powerful in mockery and defiance. Others such as Frazer saw the carnival as a monument of fruitless ingenuity, of waster labor, and of blighted hopes. Carnivalesque denoted humor that deflated pretense, embraced community, and celebrated life in its highest and lowest impulses. For Bakhtin laughter gave power to the powerless and challenged impregnable institutions. Masks served to convey that ranks were arbitrary and status was only skin deep. Masks also deviated the wearers from conformity and blurred the line between reality and make-believe. To consider the moments of the Venetian carnival is to be reminded of the sheer variety of the seasons. The carnival may be spontaneous or scripted, harmless or explosive, disruptively seditious or decorously ferocious. The carnival may stay within the limits or violate them, and its transgressions may be authorized or not. It may be used by the powerless to challenge the authority or by authorities to divide the populace. And it may offer an occasion to deny roots or to affirm one’s roots.

In the eighteenth century, the carnival of Venice was not very carnivalesque. Social mockery was limited. While the carnival during this period was chaotic, crowded, exuberant, and ecstatic, the carnivals rarely display inversion of roles and hierarchies. Political defiance was seldom and religious sensibilities were respected. And the identities of maskers were often known. This chapter discusses the Venetian carnival in the eighteenth century. It discusses the relative conservatism of the carnival. During this period, the Venetian carnival fell short of the dissolute abandon foreigners described. Its supposed disguises were less sweeping and its confusions of class less wholesale that outsiders believed. Its festivity was real but it was seldom uncontrolled. The restraint of the Venetian carnival grew from the combined effects of a state that policed the words and actions of its subjects and an overall reluctance on the part of citizens to defy the hierarchy or act out of station. Whether this reluctance arose from fear, approbation, or indifference is difficult to discern. Local maskers would have probably felt that same difficulty if asked to describe their restraint. Most, however, would have called their joy genuine as they watched their neighbours replay the script of Venetian domination ongiovedì grasso: the butcher who felled the bull with a single stroke, the boy who plunged down the cable to deliver flowers to the doge, the nobles in robes who smashed wooden castles with their clubs, the shipyard workers who danced the moresca or performed the Labors of Hercules.

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

This chapter examines the first volume in Dav Pilkey's series, The Adventures of Captain Underpants. It argues that its success with contemporary children arises from a constellation of phenomena that connects comics, a child's perceived subjugation in their childhood, and the construction of a cross-generational heroism overlapping the late 1960s culture of Pilkey's childhood and the present historical moment's fascination with that era's superheroes. Viewing The Adventures of Captain Underpants through M. M. Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, it can be seen that the book acts as a “prose allegorization,”, a visual, autobiographical narrative “whose eccentricities make the nature of all our inner lives more visible”, of childhood from a child's perspective.

In ‘Party Joyce: From the “Dead” to When We “Wake”’, Jean-Michel Rabaté traces Joyce’s ‘party vector’ from the Morkan sisters’ annual dinner-dance to the Christmas dinner of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) to the sexualised references to ‘picnic parties’ in Ulysses (1922) to the revelries in the Chapelizod pub where most of Finnegans Wake (1939) takes place, to the mythical ‘wake’ of Tim Finnegan. Further positioning these parties as ambivalent representations of traditional Irish hospitality, Rabaté argues that the ‘constant tension between the ecumenism of the “party” and the fractiousness of antagonistic political parties’ allows a politicised reading of Joyce’s oeuvre. Accordingly, Rabaté links the ‘Aesopian language’ of Lenin, who was writing Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) in Zurich at the same time as Joyce was working there on Ulysses, with the dream-language of Finnegans Wake. Rabaté also underlines the affinities of the Irish funeral-party (wake) with Bakhtinian carnivalesque. The party that Joyce keeps rewriting entails an ‘embrace of death’ by a festive life on the brink of excess. This is Joyce’s means of approaching the drive of all drives, Freud’s death drive, which alone permits feeling fully alive.

By means of poetry, play and assorted literary devices, and in expanding the final imageries of the first chapter, chapter five offers the image of the improper figure of a God who dances, laughs, who is drunk for the cosmos, that is, outside of God’s wits. This is a festive and carnivalesque figure who in loving excessively intermingles with a multitude of lovers—humans, animals, and plants—mystically becoming with them polyamorous. The path first followed is the one paved by the festive theologies and their impetus towards an aesthetic praxis, which then is assumed in a turn towards the contributions of more explicit “indecent” theologies of the festive type, aiming at making room for a God who can endure a metamorphosis—the poet of the universe incarnating its ecstatic poem, so that the poem itself can also incarnate this most hospitable divinity towards the grotesque.

New Orleans is the apocalyptic city and the interstitial city par excellence. It lies at the edge of the abyss of non-being, that is, complete destruction, and the abyss of becoming, that is, radically creative transformation. The interstitial consist of that which lies in the gaps between the “stitial,” that which “stands,” the dominant reality. The antistitial is that within the interstitial which challenges this reality and has the utopian potential to overturn it. Apocalyptic New Orleans as a symptom of an ominous global future is the bad conscience of civilization. Yet, it in its carnivalesque antistitiality, it is perhaps also the liberatory unconscious of what comes beyond civilization.