Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction

Ross, ML

ISBN 10: 0773531092 / ISBN 13: 9780773531093

Published by McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006

About this Item

This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has hardback covers. Clean from markings. In good all round condition. Dust jacket in fair condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,700grams, ISBN:9780773531093.

Seller Inventory # 7072434

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773531092
• ISBN 13: 9780773531093
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 700 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • English Literature

About this title

Synopsis

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the development and implications of racial comedy in British literature from the early twentieth century to the present.

Ross examines racial humour as a manifestation of post-colonialism and questions contemporary critiques of "political correctness." Looking at cartoons from pre-World War II issues of Punch, Ross shows how disdain for non-Europeans plays a key role in period British humour and links this idea to the racial humour in the work of Evelyn Waugh and Joyce Cary. He also demonstrates how these assumptions are later turned on their heads by writers such as Salman Rushdie.

Race Riots documents the growing self-consciousness in British comic fiction about the moral status of humour itself, a tendency that aligns recent writers like Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Angela Levy with broader postmodernist trends.

About the Author

Michael L. Ross (1936-2024) was professor emeritus at McMaster University and the author of Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising.