Framing Literary Humour

"Contrary to their oppressive design, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour, itself a form of liberation? Starting from the most obvious cases of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Containing Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment. Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyzes selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour"--