Volpone's Bastards: Theorising Jonson's City Comedy
Isaac Hui
Abstract
Through studying Volpone’s three bastard children – the dwarf, the androgyne and the eunuch – from the theoretical arguments of Freud, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, this book discusses how Jonson’s comedies are built upon the tension between death, castration and nothingness on one hand, and the comic slippage of identities in the city on the other. This study understands Jonson, first and foremost, as a comedy writer, linking his work with modern film comedies such as the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Monty Python. It is a new approach to Jonsonian studies, responding to the cur ... More
Keywords: Ben Jonson, Volpone, Early Modern English literature, Comedy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Alenka Zupančič
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 | Print ISBN-13: 9781474423472 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2018 | DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423472.001.0001 |
