Description:
The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense is the first comprehensive treatment of its subject across historical periods, languages, cultures, and theoretical frameworks. Written by scholars in a range of disciplines from philosophy to music as well as literary critics and linguists, it provides the first overview of nonsense as a vital dimension of human creativity, drawing on insights from theology to queer studies, from India to Russia, and from Ancient Greece to the late modernism of the twentieth century. Responding to a growing interest in nonsense within the academy and reflecting the diversity of understandings that the term inspires, this book aims to advance nonsense as a developing critical field, and to inspire new areas of research.
Brief description: James Williams is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. He is the author of Edward Lear (Liverpool University Press, 2018) and co-editor, with Matthew Bevis, of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016). He has published articles on Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, and Victorian comic verse.
Review Quotes:
This is the most capacious and thought-provoking volume of essays on nonsense yet published. Barton and Williams's animating question - "What kinds of things can we say or feel when we make nonsense that we cannot when we make sense?'' - can be felt throughout the book as it moves appealingly across periods and continents. The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense is a brilliant study of the many lives that nonsense can live. It will become a seminal collection.
--Matthew Bevis, Keble College, Oxford University