Publisher's Synopsis
Thomas Schmid examines with singular determination the subject of the comic in Romanticism. Deliberately proposing an alternative mode to either neoclassical satire or Schlegelian irony, the text seeks to show how major comic works of the Shelley circle sympathetically laugh at the limitations of various cultural and textual "frames" imposed upon both the comic object and the writer.;Making use of contemporary literary theorists, particularly Umberto Eco and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book presents a contribution to Romantic studies that aims to restore the humour to readings of texts like Shelley's "Witch of Atlas" and Byron's "Beppo", thus filling a long-standing gap in studies of the comic between the neoclassical and Victorian periods.
