Black Humor: Old Or New

It is well known that Gulliver's Travels is a typical satire; the special term Black Humor stands for a literary movement of the 1960s. However based on the concept of the general term black humor, by comparing the English novel of the 18th century Gulliver's Travels with the Black Humor novel of the 20th century Catch-22, this paper attempts to demonstrate that although Gulliver's Travels cannot be considered as a Black Humor novel, it is a satire colored with. the embryo concept of the general term black humor; as a concept, black humor has been old enough, taking its embryo shape in the early literature.There are three chapters in this paper. Chapter one raises the theoretical starting point of this paper: giving a general concept of the general term black humor, pointing out the striking feature of the concept: disparity between content and form, and, in respect of the reader's perception or response and the author's expression, briefly analyzing the concept. Besides, this chapter makes it dear that Black Humor which stands for a literary genre embodies the concept of the general term black humor and its striking feature of disagreement or disparity not only in contextual meanings, but also in structural arrangement and linguistic handling.Chapter two stands upon the incongruous feature of the concept of the general term black humor, analyzing the social and literary situations in details, illuminating that Gulliver's Travels shares thesimilarities with Catch-22 in the formative conditions of the concept of the general term black humor: existing blackness; opportune literary atmosphere and similar attitude towards the outside world.In respect of the contextual meaning, structure and language, chapter three demonstrates the comparison between Catch-22 and Gulliver 's Travels, stating that both novels are similar in the perception and expression of the contextual meaning which embodies the concept of the general term black humor while both are quite different in the structural organization and linguistic exertion, In revealing the disharmony between the individual and the society, these two novels have similarity and difference. It is due to all those differences between Gulliver's Travels and Catch-22 that the novel Catch-22 is regarded as a classical Black Humor novel and the effect of the concept of the general term black humor is vividly shown in this novel.Some famous critic Andre Breton named Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, the originator of black humor (referring to the general term), but few people have written on the relationship between contemporary works of Black Humor and Swift's works. By comparing Swift's Gulliver's Travels with the classic Black Humor novel of the 20th century Catch-22, this paper, for the first time, attempts to unveil the shade of the concept of the general term black humor in Swift's works, probe the literary source of the Black Humor in the 20th century and carry out a new research task on black humor.