On The Aesthetic Characteristics Of Comic Literature

Laughter is the best medicine. If you laugh, the whole world laugh with you; if you cry, you cry only. Comic literature is just one of the loaders of laughter. From ancient Greece to the present, comic literature exist in every historic period of human civilization with the laughter it brings to people from all ways of life, high and low. Comic literature is an immortal literary phenomenon, with its various genres and lasting charm.As a special aesthetic object, comic literature bears its own aesthetic characteristics, which is the research object of this thesis.The thesis is composed of nine parts, namely, Introduction, Chapter One, The origin of comedy and the nature of comic literature, Chapter Two, The comic object and the conventional images of comic literature, Chapter Three, The devices employed in comic literature, Chapter Four, The language style of comic literature, Chapter Five, The function of comic literature, Chapter Six, The tragic connotation of comic literature and the Conclusion.In the first chapter, the scope of study, the objective of study and the methodology of the study are introduced. The technical term, the comic literature is defined on the basis of the discussion on comedy as a concept in aesthetics and one in literature. The comic literature can be defined as the literary works which evoke laughter by imitating the weakness andugliness of human nature in a distorting, exaggerative and contrary way to such a degree as laughable to attack the ugly and advocate the true, the kind and the beautiful. It includes a wide range of literature genres such as poetry, novels, essays, allegories, comedies, operas and films which evoke laughter and share the same characteristics with comedies in the strict sense.In the following chapters, from Chapter One to Chapter Six, the main body of this thesis, an inductive and empirical study is made. It is devoted to the discussion on the aesthetic characteristics of comic literature in which seven characteristics of the comic literature are proposed by the author after an exhaustive, contrast and comparative study on the literary theories of comedy and comic literature. They are the origin and nature of comic literature, the comic object and the conventional images of comic literature, the devices employed, the language style, the functions and the tragic connotation of comic literature. The discussion on each characteristic is further divided into the sections such as the introduction, the literary review and the author's analysis, the summary on each characteristic, a further empirical discussion with comic literature works as proofs to support and justify the conclusions reached by the author.In the third part, the Conclusion, a conclusion of the thesis is drawn which is made up of five parts: the introduction, major findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for further study. With the seven...