Abstract
Conviviality in Dickens’s work is related to Victorian ideas about the distinction between wit and humour. Humour, according to Thomas Carlyle, has ‘tender fellow-feeling’ as its essential characteristic; it is this quality that Dickensian conviviality celebrates at key moments in his novels. Conviviality extends to Dickens’s stylistic practices, where his prose enacts the cementing of merry community relations with heightened rhetorical intensity. Laughter is seen as the key promoter of conviviality, and operates in a number of ways to reinforce community relations: as a social glue eliciting responsive smiles; as a ridiculing corrective of anti-social behaviour, such as pompous exclusiveness; and as the delighted, shocked response to recognising ‘relations in things which are not apparent generally’, as Dickens’s extravagant metaphorical practices so brilliantly display.
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Andrews, M.Y. (2020). Laughter and Conviviality. In: Lee, L. (eds) Victorian Comedy and Laughter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_2
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