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Chapter Five explores the rich and interesting but critically neglected Li'l Tomboy comic book series.Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, the series did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code.In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent:she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers.Moreover, Li'l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval.During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li'l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.Accordingly, this chapter tells the story of how, with the creation of Li'l Tomboy, Charlton Publications demonstrated that postwar gender conformity could be resisted and, even more significantly, so too could the Comics Code.

This chapter discusses the poetry of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complicated response of both to the Romantic bequest. The first section focuses on a variety of texts by Auden, including his Letter to Lord Byron, in order to bring out the intricately post-Romantic nature of his voice in his Thirties poetry. The section examines early poems such as ‘Who stands, the crux left of the watershed’ for their evidence of thwarted post-Romantic longing, as well as later poems such as ‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’ for the ways in which Auden reinvents for the modern age a poetry akin to the Romantics' in its concern to be both undidactic and ‘A way of happening’. Auden's practice in Letter to Lord Byron is compared with Byron's comic mode, and a mixture of admiration and necessary distance in Auden's view of Byron is discovered. The second section looks at Spender's attempts to preserve a Romantic lyric voice in the modern age; it compares, for example, his poem ‘Moving through the silent crowd’ with Blake's ‘London’, and sees his poetry voicing doubts about poetry of a kind inaugurated by the Romantics.

The System of Comics, a French-language book published in 1999 and translated in English in 2007, offers a theoretical explanation of the foundations of the language of comics. It shows how the principle of iconic solidarity can be applied to three major operations: breakdown, page layout, and braiding. It also describes the formal apparatus through which meaning is produced to show how aesthetic and semantic considerations are interwoven. This book follows up on the theoretical propositions put forward in The System of Comics, first by expounding on the basic concepts of iconic solidarity, sequence, and modes of reading comics. It also revisits themes such as regular page layout or the threshold of narrativity while addressing new ones, from children’s books to digital comics, manga, and abstract comics. In addition, the book examines the issue of rhythm and that of narration, as well as the relationship between comics and contemporary art. It cites examples from virtuoso American comics artists like Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, and David Mazzucchelli.

This chapter tackles the question of laughter and humour from a theoretical perspective. Rather than map out the Byzantine ‘comic landscape’ by resorting to modern theorisations, it looks at Greek medieval humour and laughter from within, in the attempt to single out elements of a Byzantine theory of the comic. Recent scholarship has gone some way towards dismantling the prejudice that there was no room for laughter in Byzantine society, combing the sources for tangible evidence of humour and jokes, or focusing on the scant traces for the survival of genres such as mimes and satires. Less reflection has been devoted to understanding how the Byzantines construed, conceptualised and justified comic features of discourse. Patristic and devotional texts, frowning upon laughter and humour, have taken the lion’s share of attention. This chapter sheds light on the other side of the coin, concentrating on secular texts used for educational purposes in middle Byzantine literature (rhetorical handbooks and commentaries), aiming to unravel the function that the Byzantines assigned to laughter, irony and humour in their literary production. Four major areas are explored, crucial to the deployment and legitimation of the comic in Byzantium: psychology, rhetorical display, didacticism and narrative.

The Borderers was Wordsworth’s apprenticeship in the dark arts of foolery. The question of whether the poet was to be the agent provocateur or the representative of his public, its unconscious or its conscience, continued to be a source of agitated fun for him, and the question is complicated by the sociopolitical commitments that helped to shape Lyrical Ballads. One of the poet’s avatars for the Fool was the balladeer or minstrel himself, and this chapter uncovers the awkward, persistent presence of the Fool in Lyrical Ballads. In particular, the chapter offers a sustained reading of "Simon Lee," a poem that offers a key (or a clue) to the bewilderment that the Fool inspires in him.

A new generation of writers in the 1950s was seen as reacting against both the literary romanticism of their predecessors and the dominant class associations of the literary world. This chapter examines the group of writers known as ‘the Movement’, especially the poetry of Philip Larkin and the novels of Kingsley Amis. It reconsiders Amis’s career and the difficulty of doing justice to his combination of originality and offensiveness. It then assesses the work and career of David Lodge, often seen as the successor to both Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis, with particular emphasis on the autobiographical character of so much of his writing.

The significant impact of tragedy on modernity includes a wide and diffuse influence on ‘ideas’, beyond philosophy in the strict sense. A prime example is the role of what J. P. Stern subsumed under the heading of ‘the dear purchase’ in modern German literature and thought. Conversely, we should insist on the value of German philosophical theories (especially Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s), but also the importance of Shakespeare and Racine, alongside the Greeks, for the understanding of tragedy itself. Among modern concepts, ‘the tragic’ needs to be seen to belong to a wider cluster that includes the sublime, irony, pathos, and humour; and assessment of the tragic world view and its impact should be set against those associated with the comic and the tragicomic—not least because of the common modern perception that tragicomedy is itself distinctively modern.