Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

Lynch, Gerald

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary Criticism

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ISBN10: 0773506527
ISBN13: 9780773506527
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Nov 1 1988
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Gerald Lynch offers new insights into the work of a popular Canadian humourist in Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity. He considers Leacock's satire to be the result of a combination of two traditions - toryism and humanism - and examines the relation between Leacock's theory of humour and his view of the world.

From the preface:

Stephen Leacock is still often regarded as a writer of lightweight amusements and unchallenging satire, as an author without an imaginative centre who lacked a vision of sufficient power and clarity to sustain a lifetime of serious writing. According to this view, which has been too easily received, Leacock squandered an early, promising talent (though he was in fact, middle-aged when he published Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in 1912), and consequently his writings, like his legendary Lord Ronald, rode madly off in all directions. After years of chasing down Leacock's numerous literary mounts, I can assert that none of this is true. Leacock's writing emerges from a centre that is the confluence of the two traditions of humanism and toryism, traditions that found in Leacock fertile ground for the propagation of such qualities as tolerance of human fallibility and acceptance of social responsibility. What is remarkable with respect to Leacock's literary output is that even his furthest-flung, seemingly inconsequential humourous pieces move in relation to this tory-humanist centre.

Lynch invites us to accompany him on an odyssey through Leacock's two main works, Sunshine Sketches and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich ... He aspires to enlighten the open-minded reader, and is highly successful in doing so. Elspeth Cameron, Coordinator of Canadian Literature and Language Program, New College, University of Toronto

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