Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction [NOOK Book]

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Overview

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the development and implications of racial comedy in British literature from the early twentieth century to the present.

Ross examines racial humour as a manifestation of post-colonialism and questions contemporary critiques of "political correctness." Looking at cartoons from pre-World War II issues of Punch, Ross shows how disdain for non-Europeans plays a key role...
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More About This Book

Overview

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the development and implications of racial comedy in British literature from the early twentieth century to the present.

Ross examines racial humour as a manifestation of post-colonialism and questions contemporary critiques of "political correctness." Looking at cartoons from pre-World War II issues of Punch, Ross shows how disdain for non-Europeans plays a key role in period British humour and links this idea to the racial humour in the work of Evelyn Waugh and Joyce Cary. He also demonstrates how these assumptions are later turned on their heads by writers such as Salman Rushdie.

Race Riots documents the growing self-consciousness in British comic fiction about the moral status of humour itself, a tendency that aligns recent writers like Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Angela Levy with broader postmodernist trends.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780773560130
  • Publisher: McGill-Queens University Press
  • Publication date: 8/7/2006
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • File size: 4 MB

Meet the Author

Michael L. Ross is emeritus professor, English and cultural studies, McMaster University, and the author of Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice, and Rome.

Table of Contents

Introduction : preliminary convulsions 3
1 Caliban and his progeny 25
2 Inferiority complexions : the London Charivari 47
3 White mischief : Evelyn Waugh's African Charivari 73
4 Joyce Cary's tragic African clown 92
5 Forster's funny bridge party : nation and humour in A passage to India 113
6 Roman Catholic carnival : Muriel Spark's passage to Jerusalem 137
7 The far and the near : Pym and Taylor 160
8 Samuel Selvon and the carnival of reverse colonization 179
9 Rerouting the comic : Salman Rushdie's The Satanic verses 203
10 "A funny kind of Englishman" : Hanif Kureishi's carnival of ethnicities 228
11 "Some subtleties of the isle" : Matthew Kneale's anti-Tempest 248
12 The empire laughs last 269

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