The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: A comic turn in contemporary English fiction? The comic turn Contemporary English fiction Who’s laughing now? 1. ‘Sinking giggling into the sea’?: Jonathan Coe and the politics of comedy Jokes and/as innovative action From satire to comedy Metacomedy 2. ‘A grave disquisition’: Style, class and comedy in the novels of Martin Amis The ethics of style High and low: Hierarchies of comic style Comedy, class and style from The Information to Lionel Asbo 3. ‘Talking about things we didn’t want to talk about’: Zadie Smith and laughter What’s so hysterical about hysterical realism? Mixed emotions: Laughter and tears ‘Talking about things we didn’t want to talk about’: Comedy and community 4. ‘Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal’: Magnus Mills and the comedy of repetition Comedy, surprise and repetition Magnus Mills Deadpan; dead bodies: The Restraint of Beasts Working to rule, ruling the workplace: The Scheme for Full Employment and The Maintenance of Headway Funny as hell: Beckett, O’Brien, Mills 5. ‘Simple high jinks’?: Nicola Barker and the comedy of paradox Pooterism, pedantry and the logic of the absurd: Incongruity as comic practice ‘Is the fucking carnival in town or what?’: Satire, the grotesque and the carnivalesque Laughter and redemption: From comedy to humour Rabbit-duck/Duck-rabbit 6. ‘No drawing of lines’: Howard Jacobson and the boundaries of the comic Lancing the boil: Zoo Time, Coming from Behind and the necessity of offence ‘Jew know why’?: The Finkler Question, Jewish Jokes and the politics of joke-telling communities ‘Not only funny’: Kalooki Nights and Holocaust comedy Comedy Trumped? Pussy and the challenge for contemporary satire Conclusion: The comic turn in contemporary English fiction Selling the past as the future: Nationhood, work and performance in Julian Barnes’s England, England Bibliography

About the Author :
Huw Marsh is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is the author of Beryl Bainbridge (2014) and works mainly on post-war and contemporary fiction.

Review :
Quietly brilliant ... as a work that is at once tightly focused on contemporary literature and truly cross-disciplinary in its approach, it will be an essential read both for students and researchers of contemporary literature and for a wider pool of comedy scholars. [A] detailed and compelling showcase for analysing modern literature as comedy. Insightful ... Marsh’s sole authorship offers the perspective of only one critic, yet The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction unpacks numerous aspects of contemporary comic writing, one in each chapter. This valuable 2020 book neatly brings us up to date (pre-covid) and makes the case that ‘comedy offers a new vocabulary for thinking about contemporary English fiction’ (210) drawing on the frameworks of other disciplines, not least comedy studies. Alongside the subtle and thoughtful insights about the centrality of comedy to literary meaning, there is much to be learned here about how that comedy illuminates contemporary issues, such as national identity, class, and the nature of work. And indeed, one of the delights of the book is a renewed sense of fiction’s gifts for elucidating such issues. We laugh in many ways and for different reasons, and we often laugh when reading contemporary British fiction—but why? Obviously, we need a new definition of English humor. Marsh provides it by elaborating a comprehensive theory of laughter that comes alive thanks to astute close readings illuminating the comic turn in British fiction. He offers all at once an encyclopedia of comedy and witty surveys of Martin Amis, Nicola Baker, Jonathan Coe, Magnus Mills, Howard Jacobson and Zadie Smith. This eminently teachable book is bound to become a classic of humor studies. This serious work on comedy should be read by everyone with an interest in contemporary English fiction. In clear and intelligent prose, Huw Marsh’s insightful book engages with major and, in some cases, critically underappreciated authors to offer new ideas about the comic and a new shape to the field.