Comedy’s commercialization, political role, and media domination mark its American evolution. Initially, humorists like Mark Twain reigned. But comedy’s move into mass media emphasized anarchic energy and gags until1920s radio and movies incorporated sound to expand humorous storytelling, witty dialogue. From these developments appeared the sitcom, a genre seized upon by early TV. Vaudeville’s comedic legacy also infiltrated TV variety shows that, by the 1960s, incorporated more provocative humor. Late-night talk shows emerged as a “gateway” for stand-up comedians. TV comedy became better known for expressing changing American values in Norman Lear’s 1960s sitcoms and Saturday Night Live’s 1975 parody sketches. Although most movie and TV comedy was not socially engaged, The Simpsons and other 1990s prime-time animation refashioned cultural parody while The Daily Show popularized the satirical newscast. Contemporary comedies embrace wider diversity highlighting gay, non-White, and female characters and narrative experimentation now that digital media compete for audiences.

This chapter considers the comic dimensions of Sancho’s correspondence. Sancho’s humor draws on British national culture to interrogate divisions within the community and to prompt readers to notice lines separating insiders from outsiders. Sancho uses farce to create internal tiers of closeness within his group of affiliates, parody to forge pathways for bonding with strangers, and satire to criticize society while also promoting recognition of commonalities.

This essay analyses Elizabeth Bowen’s comedy. It first focuses on the influence of English and Irish comic traditions on Bowen’s humour, especially her debts to Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. It then considers the historical and theoretical contexts that inform her comic fiction, written in the shadow of two world wars and a period of conflict and immense change in Ireland, and in the wake of important developments in the theory of humour itself, including interventions by Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. Bowen’s humour forms an intrinsic part of how she situates herself within literary traditions, and how she engages with themes of class and social tension, cross-cultural encounter and conflict. Bowen’s self-reflexive, ironic style employs modes such as comedy of manners, dark humour, gothic parody, mechanical humour, and satire.

Satire complicates what Agamben calls the “caesura” marking the separation of human from animal. Scenes from Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver battles with flies and wasps demonstrate this point. While Swift’s poetry suggests his awareness of their status as pests, his satire renders insects an existential threat. The second part of the chapter discusses the appearance of a single fly in Tristram Shandy: how does this brief scene both figure and not figure entanglement? When read against other scenes of human-animal encounters in Sterne, it suggests a possible entry into an enhanced form of human sympathy that pushes back against Cartesian dualism. However, even then, the fly seems utterly unlike us: its umwelt remains unknown and unknowable. Yet this may be to Sterne’s credit, as work by recent environmental writers like James Bridle suggests: in refraining from making the fly into a knowable creature, Sterne’s representation evokes a radical otherness.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

The treatment of Rome and its history in Ennius’ Annales has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work has shown well that the epic sets the city at the centre of a widening Roman world, thereby making it a cosmic hub of space and time. Such epic transformations also transform perspectives on the past and the present. What of Rome in the rest of Ennius’ wide-ranging literary output? How does the tri- or quadrilingual former Rudian approach his new unelected home and its socio-cultural practices in genres beyond epic? Taking into consideration the representation of (urban) space, monuments, social practices (especially ritual acts, praise, and elite self-presentation), and intersectional conceptions of Roman identity, this chapter examines the ways in which Ennius’ writings construct and reflect Rome qua city and set of cultural values and perspectives. The Scipio, Ambracia, and Sabinae anchor the chapter, but the contribution also uncovers key themes in less expected places, with some comment on the epigrams, Hedyphagetica, and philosophical works.

Against received opinion, this chapter argues that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within Varro’s Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project. Particular attention is paid to Varro’s Bimarcus, in which a “new” fragment of Ennius’ Saturae is tentatively discovered.

This chapter investigates the diction of the fragments attributed to Ennius’ Saturae by ancient sources and conjecturally by modern editors. While thirty or so transmitted lines naturally do not permit one to paint a conclusive picture of Ennius’ experiment, a little more can be said about the relationship between his Saturae and those of Lucilius, and ultimately about Ennius’ role in the introduction of personal poetry at Rome. Monologic and dialogic utterances and the mixture of metres (iambo-trochaic, hexameter, Sotadean) and registers (comic, informal, mock-epic) will be discussed, using Lucilius as a comparandum. Attention is paid to “early” features of language and style, with reference to Ennius’ diction in his epic and dramatic works.

This chapter offers a brief biography of Sloane, beginning with a reflection on his currently unstable position within the institutions he helped found due to his investment in the transatlantic slave trade. The chapter explores his contemporary reception as a learned man of science who held an important role in the Royal Society of London as secretary, as well as the satirical portrayals of Sloane as a undiscerning omnivore. The chapter offers close literary attention to William King’s pamphlet The Transactioneer. It then moves on to give a history and overview of Sloane’s collecting habits, including an overview of their scope, and finally offers a detailed analysis of the two main tools used to navigate the project: Sloane’s own catalogues and the British Library’s digital reconstruction of his collections.

This chapter engages Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25), which satirizes conventionally nostalgic images like childhood, courtship, and the English countryside, and is therefore usually read as anti-nostalgic. Nevertheless, Loy’s autobiographical poem returns nostalgically to moments of personal illumination experienced by the young artist and her immigrant father. These insights, into one’s inner nature and into the depths of the cosmos, ground the poem’s cultural critique. Like Joyce, Loy complicates the notion of national heritage, demanding that readers re-evaluate what it means to be English, even as she weaves nostalgia into a poem largely negative towards the past.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

This chapter argues that Ennius began his epic poem, the Annales, by boasting about his non-epic literary accomplishments, in particular his Saturae. It proceeds to corroborate this view by demonstrating that Ennius’ non-epic and non-tragic corpus – his Saturae, Sacra historia, Scipio, Sota, Epicharmus, and Hedyphagetica – continued to be read and engaged with by important Latin figures (e.g., Terence, Virgil, Apuleius, Lactantius) for hundreds of years. Multiplicity was key, therefore, both to Ennius’ self-representation and to his long Roman reception.

Chapter 2 continues to focus on self-help public speech and cultural authority but turns to the work of Paul Beatty, in particular his early novel, Tuff (2000), and later work, The Sellout, published in 2015, the same year Beatty also gave a commencement address. I explore Beatty’s ambivalent engagement with multiple discourses of self-help, from his burlesques of assimilationist ‘racial uplift’ leadership to his depictions of Black women’s empowerment cultures and descriptions of African-American social psychology frameworks. I argue that while Beatty satirizes the booming voices of self-help speakers, the reductiveness of self-help mottos, and the individualizing effects of ‘self esteem’ culture, he also finds aesthetically and ethically generative possibilities in grassroots self-help praxis and the clash of lived, communitarian forms of wisdom.

This chapter investigates the penal colony in Australia as a radical extension of European systems of social discipline and moral transformation. It considers how poets in colonial Australia faced a multitude of tasks, including the adaptation of British literary cultures to new territories, developing a sense of colonial belonging, taking imaginary possession of Indigenous lands, and also occasionally expressing ambivalence to Indigenous dispossession. The chapter discusses how poets responded to early administrative structures, with many engaging with a satiric form known as pipes that circulated clandestinely. While some poetry embraced a more ironised and alienated poetics, other poetry such as Michael Massey Robinson’s odes reinforced a Virgil-influenced alignment of land cultivation and moral improvement. The chapter then considers Barron Field’s nation-building use of poetry and the relationship between poetry and promotion of the unwritten doctrine of terra nullius.