The complete online text of An Essay on comedy and the uses of the comic spirit by George Meredith.

The English novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909) concentrated on detailed character development and witty intellectual discussion. His narrative style is often highly metaphorical, allusive, and aphoristic. George Meredith was born on Feb. 12, 1...

Between 1856 and 1895, George Meredith published fifteen novels as well as long short stories or novellas, taking as his special subject the instability of human relationships within a sharply conceived but usually arbitrary social context. As a novelist...

Between 1856 and 1895, George Meredith published fifteen novels and a number of long short stories or novellas, taking as his special subject the instability of human relationships within a sharply conceived but usually arbitrary social context. As a nov...

Ellen Glasgow's 'The Sheltered Life' is the third work in the Queensborough trilogy, all of which can be seen as a comedy of manners. Both theme and comedy in the work spring from the characters' always adhering to make-believe. Maintaining narrative distance is essential...

The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile. "Friendships Gallery" (284) If Orlando (1928) has typically been read as the literary consequence of Woolf's call for a new "art" of biography that could negotiate the tension between fact and fiction--between the "granite" and the...