Controlling Laughter

Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic

Anthony Corbeill (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

266 Seiten

1996
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-02739-5 (ISBN)

Titel ist leider vergriffen;
keine Neuauflage

Artikel merken

This work maintains that political abuse exercized real powers of persuasion over Roman audiences and demonstrates how public humour both creates and enforces a society's norms.

Previous scholarship has offered two explanations for why abusive language proliferated in Roman oratory. The first asserts that public rhetoric, filled with extravagant lies, was unconstrained by strictures of propriety. The second contends that invective represents an artifice borrowed from Greeks. The author assesses evidence outside political discourse - from prayer ritual to philosophical speculation to physiognomic texts - in order to locate independently the biases in Roman society that enabled an orator's jokes to persuade. Within each instance of abusive humour - a name pun, for example, or the mockery of a physical deformity - resided values and preconceptions that were essential to the way a Roman citizen of the Late Republic defined himself in relation to his community.

Reihe/Serie	Princeton Legacy Library
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	197 x 254 mm
Gewicht	595 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	0-691-02739-0 / 0691027390
ISBN-13	978-0-691-02739-5 / 9780691027395
Zustand	Neuware