The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: From William Caxton to P.G.Wodehouse - A Conducted Tour

by Frank Muir (Editor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1990

  $3.25

  Starting with Caxton in 1477 Frank Muir shows how humorous writing has developed and refined through five centuries by such practitioners and innovators as Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, and also how humour ranges from the crude to the subtle. It includes extracts from 215 different authors and anonymous pieces and there is a representation of American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand prose as well as from Britain. The extracts quoted vary in length from a single paragraph to a complete story and there is a connecting text which introduces and sets the pieces in context. Framk Muir has written The Frank Muir Book .

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.25

  Frank Muir guides the reader through five centuries of humorous prose in the English language. Starting in London with William Caxton and a preface written and printed in 1477, and ending with P.G. Wodehouse whose last novel was published in 1977, the route is meandering: from England to Ireland and Scotland, back to England again, on to America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. There are examples chosen from humorous fiction, letters, and journalism written by over 200 authors and ranging from medieval jests to the New Yorker and Beachcomber; from Thomas Nashe and Tom Brown's galloping bawdy to Jane Austen and on to Garrison Keillor and Arthur Marshall; from the jokes in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and his hangover. The great humorous writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and P.G. Wodehouse are given a kind of mini-anthology of their own so that the range and versatility of their work can be appreciated. The extracts are accompanied by a commentary which sets the writers in their historical context with items of contemporary gossip and anecdotal biography.