| Through the study of Victorian humor, this project combines history of the book and formal analysis to provide a new perspective on the social world of literature. The joke forms one model for reader relationships in literary humor, spontaneous and interactive, suggesting physical proximity. While Victorian literary humorists often invoke this type of immediacy as an ideal, they also valorize a specifically literary humor, one that works precisely because of the distance created by what Richard Altick called the rise of the "mass reading public." The humorists in this study responded to the tension between distance and immediacy by making it---and mediation more broadly---a source of humor. Paradoxically, calling attention to distance helped create immediacy. In Victorian humor from several media and genres---Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers; children's literature by William Makepeace Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and E. Nesbit; Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas; and Jerome K. Jerome's novels and journalism---this self-reflexive humor served to strengthen reader relationships, in part---somewhat counter intuitively---by interrupting them.;Humor about their own methods of transmission and consumption generally surfaces in these texts through moments that interrupt the main action. Successful use of interruptive humor preserves the cycle of readerly attention (as Nicholas Dames describes it) yet creates premature breaks in the cycle, a surprising gesture that is akin to humor and leads easily to it. These interruptions allow the pleasure of immersion but tie it to an awareness of what creates that pleasure: the author and the apparatus of mass publication. The use of humor in these interruptive, self-consciously mediated moments wires the joke directly into the reader relationship, using laughter to illuminate the mechanisms of readership. Humor provides a unique way of reconciling contradictions; through humor's double vision, readers can see the comfortable incongruity of feeling a personal relationship through a mass-circulated form. |
