Abstract
This chapter examines the significant and formative impact that the laughter of the music hall had upon literary culture. During the fin de siècle, the animus towards the popular humour of the music hall in pessimistic novels by writers such as George Gissing, gave way to an embrace of verbal comedy in the works of ‘cockney school’ and ‘New Humour’ writers including Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and William Pett Ridge. This investigation makes the case that this tonal crisis in the genre of literary realism marks a moment of energetic rejuvenation, rather than terminal decline. The disruptive vernacular speech and ‘laughing grammar’ of the music hall sparked important experiments in genre formation, which radically transformed the mood and temper of realist presentation.
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Jones, P.T.A. (2020). Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall. In: Lee, L. (eds) Victorian Comedy and Laughter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_10
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