As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

This chapter looks at a humor subgenre of manga defined by form, the four-panel (comic) strip known in Japanese as yonkoma manga. While this form has played a significant role in modern manga history, including a close interrelation with story-manga, it remains underrepresented in comics studies today. Yonkoma manga can be found in magazines and on internet platforms, but in this chapter, the focus leans toward newspapers where the strips initially developed and today still reach their widest audience. A brief historical overview of the development and current situation of four-panel strips is given before attention turns to their structure, usually described as ki-shō-ten-ketsu (introduction-development-turn of events-conclusion). How this conventional narrative structure is approached varies. This is demonstrated by introducing the creative processes of a few artists. To highlight this structure, an example strip is described. To move beyond mere explications of narrative pattern, however, this chapter ends with a simple application of linguistic humor theory to reveal in part how the humor is created, and to call for more engagement with humor theories in manga studies.

Chapter Nine explores Rogers’ humor, which was the common denominator in his wide-ranging endeavors as a public figure . It argues that he was the heir of a homespun, cracker-box tradition of comic commentary dating back to Benjamin Franklin and continuing through Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mr. Dooley, and Mark Twain. Rogers presented a comic persona composed of common sense, a puncturing of pretense and pomposity, and a head-shaking, chuckling exposure of the absurdities of modern values and traditional prejudices alike. He did not tell jokes but offered witty reflections on the conundrums of modern life, appearing as a rustic sage cracking wise at the local general store. Moreover, while Rogers took pains to present his humor as spontaneous, it was actually meticulously prepared. Ultimately, by joking about the tensions, incongruities, and dislocations of a rapidly modernizing society, he helped Americans come to terms with enormous changes affecting their lives. Their rapturous reception made Rogers the leading American humorist of early twentieth-century America.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

Chapter Seven digs deeper into Roger’s commentary to uncover his attempts to explain the essence of American values. He consistently probed what it meant to be an Americanand did so with wit and insight. Roger stressed several qualities that he believed defined his society: a veneration of ordinay people and a concern for their well-being, a suspicion of social and economic elitism, a respect for the work ethic,and a belief in social egalitarianism and economic opportunity. Rogers’ populist mind-set caused him to locate "the American soul" in common people. He saw the best of American tradition in William Jennings Bryan, the best of modern innovation in aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the ideal combination in industrialist Henry Ford. Ironically, after years of imbibing his humorous reflections, many people concluded that the nature and meaning of America appeared when Rogers looked in the mirror. He became the keeper of the American soul.

Chapter Four treats Rogers’ alliance with Florenz Ziegfeld, whose popular Zeigfeld Follies made him the leading entertainer in early twentieth-century America. When the Oklahoman joined the show, he served as a cowboy counterpoint to the glamorous Ziegfeld Girls and sophisticated urban dancers and comedians. Rogers’ witty observations and droll comments on the events and values of the day, delivered in a drawling voice and homespun manner, delighted city audiences and critics alike. Attired in cowboy clothes and often twirling a rope, his humorous monologues and shrewd observations sharpened his image as a plainspoken man of the people, a national star, and a celebrity.

After a short discussion of the actual typescripts and manuscripts of Lowell’s letters, this chapter centers on the published books of letters, which have become a central, rewarding part of Lowell’s oeuvre. On the level of style, Lowell’s letters can help us hear the poems better: above all, they make audible the comic tones under-recognized in his poetry. On the level of content, the letters shed light on Lowell’s literary contexts, his interests, and his thinking in specific poems: When Lowell writes to other poets about their work, he frequently reveals quite a bit about his own. And finally, the letters create an autobiography that encompasses gossip, complaint, apology, argument, critique, and confession.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.

Introduced in the 1890s, cinema became a vital part of the culture to which Pirandello devoted his career. While he engaged to some extent with cinematic practice in promoting his works for adaptation or writing a screenplay from his Six Characters in Search of an Author, his relation to the medium lies predominantly in the conceptual affinities between cinema as a unique and pervasive means of expression and his philosophical outlook as theorized in the essay On Humor, the blueprint of his poetics. Describing an author’s disposition and its ensuing literary technique, “humor” is a conceptual model according to which the reliance on reason in attaining truth leads to an interpretation of experience in multiple, coexisting, and conflicting illusory constructs. This chapter examines Pirandello’s response to cinema’s aesthetic possibilities, which is evident in some of the short stories he recommended for adaptation and in the novel Shoot! and his screenplay from Six Characters, a metafictional inquiry into artistic creation whose protagonist and actor in that role would have been Pirandello himself.

Luigi Pirandello engaged in a “battle of ideas” with two key figures of early twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture, Benedetto Croce and Adriano Tilgher. Pirandello criticized Croce’s separation of art and science, arguing that they form an interconnected unity. He also criticized Croce’s aesthetics and the separation of intuition from thought, which for Pirandello were both essential to the making of any work of art. Consequently, Croce provided disparaging remarks on Pirandello’s theatre that became very influential among contemporary literary critics. In contrast, Tilgher was one of the first critics to analyze Pirandello’s work with hermeneutical attention and is credited with creating the term pirandellismo. Influenced by Simmel and Bergson, and rejecting all types of metaphysics, Tilgher defended the autonomy of art while also acknowledging its capacity to interpret and reflect cultural contexts. However, Tilgher gradually took a critical stance in respect to Pirandello, both for political reasons and for a controversy over the famous “life/form” critical formulation, which Tilgher claimed as his own invention, while evidence shows that it was extrapolated from Pirandello’s writing.

In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

This chapter examines the complicated relationship between irony and humor, primarily from the perspective of neo-Gricean pragmatics (e.g., an ironic utterance flouts/overtly violates the maxim of Quality). Not all irony is humorous, of course, in part because of the highly polysemous nature of irony. In this light, it is important to distinguish irony that is humorous from irony that is related to sarcasm, teasing, parody, and even playfulness. Dynel offers a formal test by which one may determine what forms of humor may be specifically viewed as “irony.” She also describes some of the reasons why irony sometimes expresses humor, focusing on the importance of contrast and incongruity in judgments of ironic humor, but extending this emphasis to include surprise, absurdity, and creativity as key facets of humorous irony. Even blindness to irony can elicit humorous responses in some interpersonal situations. Dynel’s chapter also considers some of the intricacies in the ways speakers use humorous irony to position themselves in various interactions with others.

Warrior, dove, pragmatist, revolutionary, institutionalist – Lyndon Johnson inhabited a range of personas, each of which expressed his hopes, fears, vision, and philosophy. Johnson’s presidency expressed itself in those contradictions, securing extraordinary gains on behalf of those marginalized at home while unleashing bloodshed on millions living abroad. His lifelong desire for recognition, his powerful wish to be loved, his surpassing need to control and dominate, his deep-seated yearning to lift up the oppressed and ennoble the downtrodden – these attributes coalesced in a roughly five-year presidential tenure that harnessed the power of the state to effect fundamental change. This chapter offers a window onto his persona and its impact on his presidency. His strengths and weaknesses are evident in several dimensions of his management style, including his use of people, his workday habits, his pursuit of information, and his decision-making process. Each shaped his triumphs and his failures, and persisted throughout his life and career, as would the principles he gleaned at an early age – both the idealistic and the less ennobling. Collectively, these aspects reveal much about LBJ and his presidency, and provide a backdrop for deeper exploration of his legacy and significance.