The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor. In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vallès and la blague; exaggeration in Vallès and Cd'eline (Mort à credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Météores). Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier

Literature & Fiction

Redfern, Walter

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Collects and analyzes puns in literature, traces their use from classical times to the present, and looks at wordplay in popular culture, the visual arts, dreams, and advertising

Puns (Language Library)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Blackwell Pub.

Puns are traditionally the lowest form of wit. This book, a defence of the much maligned pun, asks us to think twice about its place in our lives and our culture. It is at different moments an analysis, a history and an anthology of puns. It collects and dissects them in literature tracing their fortunes from classical times to the present in the hands of for example, Lucretius, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Beckett. The book also discusses puns in popular culture, the visual arts, graffiti, dreams and so on.

Redfern, W.D.

Blackwell*publishers

This book is a study of Michel Tournier's collection of short stories, Le Coq de bruyere, but it is also much more. Author Walter Redfern sees the stories as a microcosm of the whole fictional universe of Tournier, widely regarded as France's premier living writer. Each story is analyzed in detail for its meaning, residual ambiguities, artistic qualities and flaws, and its place in the total collection. As Tournier thinks big, even in a short text, Redfern finds many links between the longer fiction of Tournier's novels and these stories. Indeed, Tournier considers himself primarily as a teller of tales - or a re-teller - since several of these stories recycle, divert, and update such well-known narratives as Genesis, Cain and Abel, Tom Thumb, ogres, dwarfs, Robinson Crusoe, Tristan and Isolde, and St. Veronica. Tournier's obsessive themes of the androgyne, self-assertion, the multiple forms of creativity, and the overlapping of fixed categories give the collection its pointed and powerful resonance. Redfern's conclusion seeks a precariously balanced equation of Tournier's genius and his chicanery. It stresses the appropriateness of mixed responses to so profoundly ambiguous a writer. Tournier offers to readers a mixed bag: sights for sore eyes, cloying or nausea of the palate, refreshment of jaded minds. Though centered on Tournier's short stories, this study offers a way in, enlarging and not reductive, to his work in general.

Michel Tournier: Le Coq De Bruyere

UNKNO

This book is a study of Michel Tournier's collection of short stories, Le Coq de bruyre, but it is also much more. Author Walter Redfern sees the stories as a microcosm of the whole fictional universe of Tournier, widely regarded as France's premier living writer.

Michel Tournier: Le Coq de bruy_re

Reference

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

The 19th century in France spawned numerous 'fous litteraires, one of them being Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919). An individualist among individualists, he dismantled the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose purposes, which were to explain afresh the development of human beings (from frogs) and of their language (from croaks). Continuous and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this study, Redfern examines such themes as the nature of literary madness, the phenomenon of deadpan humour, the role of analogy, and the place of institutional religion in Brisset's creative rewriting of the creation.

All Puns Intended: The Verbal Creation of Jean-Pierre Brisset (Research Monographs in French Studies, 9)

Routledge

Stimulating, challenging, engaging, dauntingly well informed and wide-ranging, Professor Redfern's revised book on puns offers massive returns both to the specialist researcher and the interested general reader. Taking his examples back to ancient literatures, but drawing especially on English, American and French cultures (popular and high), he defies the way in which the pun has so often been denigrated as a poor relation within the family of humorous modes, and his sparkling and inventive prose fully justifies that approach. Every page offers original examples amid material from his sources, tellingly examined but without the dogmatic imposition of a preconceived (and therefore, perhaps, inadequate) theory. 
 That exclusion, criticised by earlier reviewers, perceptibly enhances the chapters he presents, which cover, among other matters, the psychology and psychopathology of word-play, the history of punning (particularly enlightening on the English 18th and 19th centuries, though Hugo, Flaubert and others also figure strongly), how punning links with etymology, anagram, neologism and rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, irony, litotes and syllepsis, the commercialisation of puns in the advertising industry and their exploitation by the press, and an intriguing extension of wordplay into the visual as developed in film and TV, as well as by artists like Arcimboldo and Duchamp. 
Academica Press is an independent scholarly press specializing in publishing monographs and reference material in the humanities and social sciences. We are particularly interested in producing works of scholarly interest English language studies, literary history and criticism ,drama, sociology, education and Irish studies. (Our dedicated imprint, Maunsel &amp; Co., specializes in scholarly research in Irish studies.) We have recently developed projects in African and Afro-American research areas as well as Theology and Legal Studies. 
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 -American 19th- and 20th-Century Language and Literature -British 19th- and 20th-Century Language and Literature -Irish Studies -African Studies and African-American Studies -Law, including Sports Law -Higher Education -English Church History

Puns and Their Kin

Academica Press

Albert Londres (1884-1932) was a much-translated French investigative journalist, distinguished by the application of humour to serious reporting. His journalistic coverage was extremely wide (Europe, Soviet Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, South America), as were his themes: war, revolution, racism, prison and asylum conditions, the slave trade, colonialism, sport. This study compares and contrasts Londres with other globetrotting reporters from France, Britain and the USA who deal courageously and innovatively with history in the making. The approach is historical, sociological and rhetorical. The author investigates the shifting borderline between journalism and literature and critically examines the numerous clichés about, and by, journalists.

Writing on the Move: Albert Londres and Investigative Journalism (European Connections)

Arts & Photography

Business of Art

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Cet ouvrage se propose d’étendre le champ d’étude du phénomène calembouristique beaucoup plus loin que ne l’ont fait les enquêteurs précédents. A cette fin, il s’organise de façon chronologique (depuis diverses langues de l’Antiquité jusqu’aux plus récentes exploitations du jeu de mots), et thématique. Après la partie historique viennent des chapitres consacrés au phénomène dans divers domaines de la vie sociale: littérature, presse, publicité, arts visuels. Des domaines peu étudiés par autrui tels que la maladie mentale (y compris les lapsus) et la psychanalyse sont examinés du côté malade psychiatrique et du côté médical. Ce livre se penche également sur les figures de rhétorique qui ont une parenté avec le calembour: ironie, étymologie, rime, mots-valises, proverbes, néologismes, clichés. Il se trouve que le calembour sait détourner les proverbes pour en faire des perverbes, et réanimer les syntagmes endormis. A tour de rôle, les cultures anglaise, française et américaine fournissent diverses exploitations du jeu de mots. L’auteur s’est efforcé de réhabiliter une figure jusqu’ici trop souvent dépréciée.

Calembours, ou les puns et les autres: Traduit de l’intraduisable (French Edition)

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Books by Redfern, Walter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Redfern, Walter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier

Puns (Language Library)

Puns (Language Library)

Michel Tournier: Le Coq De Bruyere

Michel Tournier: Le Coq de bruy_re

All Puns Intended: The Verbal Creation of Jean-Pierre Brisset (Research Monographs in French Studies, 9)

Puns and Their Kin

Writing on the Move: Albert Londres and Investigative Journalism (European Connections)

Calembours, ou les puns et les autres: Traduit de l’intraduisable (French Edition)