Introduction : comedy and the irresponsible self -- Don Quixote's Old and New Testaments -- Shakespeare and the pathos of rambling -- How Shakespeare's "irresponsibility" saved Coleridge -- Dostoevsky's God -- Isaac Babel and the dangers of exaggeration -- Saltykov-Shchedrin's subversion of hypocrisy -- Anna Karenina and characterisation -- Italo Svevo's unreliable comedy -- Giovanni Verga's comic sympathy -- Joseph Roth's empire of signs -- Bohumil Harabal's comic world -- J.F. Powers and the priests -- Hysterical realism -- Jonathan Franzen and the "social novel" -- Tom Wolfe's shallowness, and the problem of information -- Salman Rushdie's nobu novel -- Monica Ali's novelties -- Coetzec's disgrace : a few skeptical thoughts -- Saul Bellow's comic style -- The real Mr. Biswas -- V.S. Pritchett and English comedy -- Henry Green's England.
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