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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This chapter examines a 1948 lithograph entitled Negro Maskers by New Orleans-based Southern Regionalist painter John McCrady (1911-1968), who produced the image for Mardi Gras Day, a book project completed with fellow artists Ralph Wickiser and Caroline Durieux. It documents McCrady’s conception of the southern US, in the decade following the Depression, as a site of singular “folk” distinction, rendered unique by picturesque scenery, African American cultural expressions, dockside scenes along the Mississippi, and carnivalesque traditions such as the Baby Doll masqueraders. Negro Maskers’ stylistic references to EI Greco, Mannerism, American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and dream-like Symbolism will be discussed, charting how the image fits snugly into McCrady’s cultivation of a “Southern Eccentric” aesthetic. Above all, McCrady's print will be examined within the context of other sentimentalized, yet often subversive, images of southern, vernacular U.S. culture that distinguished his work from that of Midwestern-centered American Regionalist painters.

In this chapter the explores the comedic devices and themes on display in The Far Side. First, he looks into Larson’s working methods as a comedian, charting his process from free associative brainstorming into strategies of refining and clarifying his jokes, and finally receiving critical feedback from editors. Second, using specific cartoons as examples, he analyzes the humor of Larson’s work in relation to basic theories of what makes us laugh: surprising incongruities, irreverent treatments of taboo subject matter, and comic depictions of violence or misfortune that evoke in the reader mingled emotions of sympathy and schadenfreude. He then explores a number of the comedic devices commonly used in The Far Side, considering ways that Larson modified or combined them in original ways: wordplay that literalized figurative speech or tested the logic of clichéd maxims; in medias res (in the middle of the action) vignettes that required readers to complete a narrative; cross-overs between animal and human worlds; gothic or morbid deconstructions of comforting social myths; and cheeky parodies of a variety of genres, mediums and discourses. Throughout the chapter the author periodically breaks away from close readings of Larson’s cartoons to paint in broad strokes the larger philosophical meanings circulating around The Far Side, suggesting ways that his comedy often became pointedly satiric, borrowing from the philosophical traditions of naturalism, absurdism, and the carnivalesque.

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.

Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure one single line from the “Cyclops” section of Ulysses about an elephant called Jumbo. It follows Jumbo the elephant through a thicket of cultural history in the 1880s to discover the elephant as a symbol of imperial ambition, of the carnivalesque and the tragic, of a Victorian age. The approach to Jumbo the Elephant reveals a way in to Joyce through exhumation, through the recovery of a world that has been lost, just as Ulysses is a recovery of a pre-war world.

This essay makes the case for a new orientation of postcolonial translation theory based on a paradigm shift in contemporary African literature from preoccupations with relations between the colonized and the colonizer to explorations of relations between the elite and the masses within the postcolony itself. The paradigm of class and power is highlighted in this literary trend which, although still concerned with the theme of power differential characteristic of postcolonial literature, shines the light on inequalities and social conflicts internal to the postcolony. Empirically grounded in the practice of linguistic and literary heteroglossia, the essay explores the fictionalizing of popular discourse as a sociological construct in the study of power relations, and the implications for postcolonial translation research.

This chapter argues for the longstanding affinity between the market and the theatre, expressed in the frequent elision of festivity with commerce in markets, fairs and carnivals. The chapter utilises Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, and Stallybrass and White’s application of it to cultural transgression. It argues that the street markets were performative places, and picks up earlier analysis of sensory affect in an investigation of the soundscape of the markets. Performance and sound lead into a final section that continues the cultural analysis of the markets and their people commenced in the previous chapter, describing how the costermongers populated the music hall stage, with a voice and look that was distilled (directly or indirectly) from street market origins. It concludes that the street markets existed on stage and in representation in a form that allowed them to be consumed nostalgically into popular culture well beyond the period of this study.

This chapter discusses the ideas and themes underpinning the volume, contextualizing the importance of the gastric area in literary and medical culture, and more widely in the cultural imaginary of the eighteenth-century. It discusses the various ways in which stomach disorders, digestive motions, and belly-centred conceptions of the self and society complicate notions of the Enlightenment. Using examples from artisanal diaries, from scientific experiments, and from eighteenth-century novels, the chapter contextualizes and introduces the main themes of the volume: from revolutionary art’s visualizations of the viscera, to carnivalesque scatologies, to medical conceptions of the function of the stomach, and the city as bodily organism.

This essay lays bare the rampant but thinly veiled scatology in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s renowned commentaries of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. It shows that Lichtenberg finds all kinds of scatological objects – chamber pots, enemas, anal swabs – in Hogarth’s prints by applying what he calls the hermeneutics of hypochondria. Such a hermeneutics follows digressions, metaphorical associations, and metonymical connections to identify scatological objects in the images even where there are none. The resulting excremental vision of A Harlot’s Progress evidences, in Lichtenberg’s view, his own hypochondria and threatens the validity of his interpretations. But he also turns the scatological motif against the interpretive excess that produced it: excrement confronts the hypochondriacal interpreter with his own corporeal mortality and thus with the limits of his interpretive capacities as a human. Scatological satire therefore serves, in Lichtenberg’s conception, as something like a cynic self-therapy for interpretive hubris.