Reading the Absurd - Hardcover

Gavins, Joanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748669264 ISBN 13: 9780748669264

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Challenges traditional scholarship on absurdist literature, privileging the reader and the genre's stylistic achievementsSince Martin Esslin coined 'the Theatre of the Absurd' to describe experimental drama in the mid-twentieth century, the term 'absurd' has been adopted as a means of discussing a vast array of literary text. Many accounts have focused on the philosophical and thematic concerns of absurd prose fiction, but literary-criticism has failed to agree on the stylistic, generic, and temporal. This volume takes an alternative approach: its core aim is to provide a coherent, linguistically rigorous examination of the discourse features which characterise the absurd in literature.In order to understand how such a critically ill-defined term continues to have value and relevance to a global readership in the twenty-first century it takes as its starting point the readers who regularly use absurd terms and investigates their discussions in online fora, on literary tagging websites, and in face-t

About this title

About the Author:

Joanna Gavins is lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Sheffield, UK,

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0748669264
• ISBN 13: 9780748669264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224