The ‘idea of absolute music’ proposed by Carl Dahlhaus has encouraged a view of German Romantic music aesthetics as preoccupied with instrumental music, and more interested in lofty metaphysics than emotion. Yet writers such as Novalis and Hoffmann saw the ‘Absolute’ precisely in emotional terms, and argued that its presentation was the task of a new, socially accessible genre of national opera. This would draw its subjects from the popular mythological and ‘romantic’ realm of fairy tale and fantasy, while ‘pure’ music – instrumental and church genres – was imagined in the sensational contemporary terms of the gothic. When instrumental genres were eventually revaluated above opera, it was because they were held to embody another popular trait valued by Hoffmann – humour. Strongly promoted by German critics in the 1830s, humour and the ‘humoristic’ posited the exploitation of emotional contrast as the highest aim of instrumental music after Beethoven.

Lucian’s In Praise of the Fly offers a delightfully wry encomium of the humble house fly. While the speech engages wittily with sophistic traditions by praising this troublesome insect, it also raises important questions about social marginality and the workings of power, and about the mechanisms through which value is conventionally assessed and reinforced. This chapter examines scale, social status, and literary self-consciousness in Lucian’s representation of the fly as a creature of immense cultural importance. The encomium, it is argued, plays with conventional associations between size and value, revelling in comic juxtapositions of scale, and in the mismatch between ambition and achievement. It also exploits traditional modes of discourse that present animals as models for the socially disenfranchised, and draws on the vocabulary of literary criticism and composition in order to evoke and challenge the symbolism traditionally attributed to other insects and to represent the fly provocatively as the new emblem of a refined literary and cultural aesthetic.

Because of rising literacy rates and improved printing technology, the short periodical essay gained in prominence and ubiquity in Britain between 1870 and 1920. Essayists such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc presided over the essay’s shift away from its long, mid-Victorian magisterial form to something more entertaining, modest, immediate, and apparently trivial. However, this shorter essay accomplished serious thought by way of its lightness, and was uniquely suited to twentieth-century urban modernity, as each of these authors show in their most anthologised essays. While this short, entertaining form of the essay was most prominent, the essay thrived in an unprecedented number of contexts and forms during this period. Oscar Wilde demonstrates the essay’s range in his immediate, paradoxical, irreverent, and serious letter from prison, ‘De Profundis’, and in doing so, hints at the future of the essay.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

Walter Map’s De nugis curialium is a strange work, comprising a series of humorous anecdotes, with some serious satire, particularly of the monastic orders. Despite the attention it has drawn in modern times, it seems not to have been widely known and is preserved only in Bodleian MS Bodl. 851.

Richard of Devizes was a Benedictine monk who wrote a rather satirical chronicle of the reign of Richard I, somewhat in the vein of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales. It has a secular slant and often blends fact and fiction for the purpose of entertainment. Richard often makes reference to classical literature.

Pater describes the writings of Charles Lamb as ‘an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’. The remark is surprising because Lamb more often is celebrated for the warm familiarity of his essays rather than the withholding and coolness associated with reserve. It is Pater himself who was famed for his reserve, shy in company and elusive in his writing. But his essay on Lamb identifies a different quality of reserve and the different ways in which it can operate as an element of literary style. The humour of Lamb’s writing is a form of reserve that conceals the tragic facts of his life. Such concealment works through excess and deflection, masking the personal without seeming too remote or buttoned-up. What Pater values in Lamb provides insight into the peculiar reserve of his own writing, with its paradoxical mix of the personal and impersonal, and its style that is at once so elusive and so individually distinctive.

The best way to characterise the pleasure of thinking is to retrace its development. Chapter 2 thus approaches the pleasure of thinking from the perspective of developmental psychology. After a presentation of the meta-theoretical frame of a sociocultural, constructivist, developmental approach, the chapter first presents the classical observations made by Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget, both of whom identified manifestations of pleasure in young children. Second, the chapter examines the literature based on close analysis of parent-infant observations, which shows that from 3 or 4 months of age, children may experience playfulness, a shared pleasure in humorous situations, and the positive experience of being the author of their actions. Third, it presents literature on curiosity, humour, and interests in the preschool years, which reveals that children’s curiosity can be cultivated into interests. In school years, fourth, pleasure is often considered at the margin of the classroom, but also in relation to mathematics and, incidentally, in interactions. In the final section, the chapter rereads longitudinal data, retracing the conditions in which children may develop pleasure in learning and thinking.

Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.

This chapter focusses on discourse: how emperors were discussed and understood and how they were seen to interact with society. In particular, the chapter argues that part of the expectations placed on emperors was their ability to take a joke. Analysis focusses on emperors making and taking jokes, which outlines themes of accessibility and affability with wider society. An inability to be seen as jocular or amused translated as negative impressions of character that were fundamental to the historical and biographical receptions of emperors.

This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.

The chapter ’Meowlogisms’ explains morphological processes by using meowlogisms, which are a typical linguistic feature of cat-related digital spaces. These are created with cat-inspired morphemes and lexemes – called ’meowphemes’ here – with which people create new words to give their communication a feline spin. The chapter also looks at the reasons we consider certain words funny and discusses the concepts of humour, iconicity, and funniness in relation to meowlogisms. Denoting the feline perspective, meowlogisms are also present in the linguistic landscapes and are, thus, a feature that can be studied when it comes to the public spaces around us.

This chapter provides an introduction to poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s responses to war, predominantly in poetry, but also in his music.It explores the strategies used by Gurney in the face of war; his sense of fate; his use of, and response to, place; his representation of the ordinary soldier; and his responses to the conflict through the lens of writings by Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoi.

This article illustrates the paradoxical position that Molière occupies in contemporary English-speaking culture: at once absent and omnipresent, little known by the general public but enjoying a select place on the British stage. Molière’s success in Britain over the last few decades has been due to the use of strategies to reduce the gulf that sometimes separates the original plays and the expectations of the English-speaking public. Numerous translators have sought to accentuate their socio-political relevance. However, their relocalisation and the addition of modern cultural references have often been merely a pretext for increasing their burlesque content and introducing quips and puns, thereby making them more commercial. Domestication can be seen also in the transformation of the alexandrine into a verse form that emphasises rhyme to add still more verbal humour. Of the ten adaptations produced by the National Theatre in London, each in its own way contributes to the debate surrounding the ethos of translation. Should Molière translations preserve the original or endlessly reinvent themselves to make the public laugh, as the dramatist himself sought to do? Most translators from the second half of the twentieth century knew to which camp they belonged.