Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr, 1995-04-01. Hardcover. Like New. 6x1x9. [From the library of noted scholar Richard A. Macksey.] Hardcover and dust jacket. Good binding and cover. Minor shelf wear. Clean, unmarked pages. 387 pages, 24 cm. <br> This work explores narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion function as structural linchpins, and previous theories of comedy as well as more general philosophical ideas, are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. <br> "Richard A. Macksey was a celebrated Johns Hopkins University professor whose affiliation with the university spanned six and a half decades. A legendary figure not only in his own fields of critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies but across all the humanities, Macksey possessed enormous intellectual capacity and a deeply insightful human nature. He was a man who read and wrote in six languages, was instrumental in launching a new era in structuralist thought in America, maintained a personal library containing a staggering collection of books and manuscripts, inspired generations of students to follow him to the thorniest heights of the human intellect, and penned or edited dozens of volumes of scholarly works, fiction, poetry, and translation." - Johns Hopkins University