Seeing the Funny Side: Slapstick, Visuality, and Victorian Literary Form

维多利亚时代的文学包含了许多时刻，评论家们只是在发展语言来描述。从梅雷迪思的《我们的征服者之一》中的香蕉皮滑倒；狄更斯的《远大前程》中，口袋里的孩子们用别针漱口；从克兰福德的亚马逊人躲在地窖里躲避暴力窃贼，这个项目试图纠正这种不安，开发一种被称为“文学闹剧”的新词汇。滑稽戏起源于艺术喜剧，但在20世纪的电影中得到了最广泛的发展。该项目将维多利亚时代小说的复调空间视为18世纪和20世纪喜剧传统之间的文化媒介。考虑到这部维多利亚时代的三层资产阶级小说在前后出现的喧闹、身体上的拍打和挠痒，我们能得到什么新的见解呢？文学闹剧如何用维多利亚时代主体性和审美形式的新答案来解决老问题？第一章认为，狄更斯的《匹克威克外传》和《奥利弗·特威斯特》改写了摄政时期舞台闹剧的残余能量，产生了一种视觉诗学，与长篇小说的隐含目的论作斗争，并有力地回忆起期刊出版。第二章将试图恢复女权主义喜剧的传统。玛吉·亨尼菲尔德写道：“女权主义总是通过集体欢乐的笑声来动员和加强”；本章认为，在盖斯凯尔的《克兰福德》、艾略特的《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》和鲜为人知的梅内拉·比特·斯梅德利的诗中，闹剧成为反映女性苦难的一种可接受的美学，预示了早期电影喜剧的作品。第三章转向阶级政治的闹剧引擎，认为在狄更斯的《远大前程》和梅雷迪思的《埃文·哈林顿》中，闹剧被用来编纂阶级斗争。第四章展示了卡罗尔和李尔的荒唐闹剧刺穿了维多利亚时代资产阶级的身体。他们的闹剧完全有弹性的形式，预示着维多利亚晚期的身体和卓别林的“现代身体”。

Victorian literature contains many moments that critics are only just developing the language to describe.From slipping on banana skins in Meredith's *One of Our Conquerors*; to the Pocket children gargling onsafety pins in Dickens's *Great Expectations*; to the Amazonians of *Cranford* hiding in the cellar fromviolent burglars, this project attempts to redress this aporia, developing a new vocabulary of what it terms'literary slapstick'.Drawing on the cultural repertoire of slapstick, which originated in commedia dell'arte, but was developedmost progressively in 20th-century cinema, this project views the polyphonic space of the Victorian novel asa cultural mediator between the comic traditions of the 18th and 20th centuries. What new insights can begained by considering the bourgeois three-decker Victorian novel in light of the rumbustious, physicalisedslap and tickle that came before and after? How does literary slapstick address old questions with newanswers about Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form?Chapter One argues that Dickens' *Pickwick Papers* and *Oliver Twist* transliterated the residual energiesof Regency stage-slapstick, generating a visual poetics that strives against the implicit teleology of thevolume-novel, and powerfully recalls periodical publication. Chapter Two will attempt to retrieve a feministcomic tradition. Maggie Hennefield writes that "feminism has always been mobilized and strengthenedthrough collective joyful laughter"; this chapter argues that, in Gaskell's *Cranford*, Eliot's *Mill on theFloss*, and the lesser-known verses of Menella Bute Smedley, slapstick becomes an acceptable aestheticfor female suffering, prefiguring the work of early-film comediennes. Chapter Three turns to class-politicsas slapstick engine, arguing that slapstick is mobilised in Dickens' *Great Expectations* and Meredith's*Evan Harrington* to codify class strife. Chapter Four shows Carroll and Lear's nonsense slapstick puncturing the bourgeois Victorian body. Their slapstick radically elasticated forms, foreshadowing theleaky Late-Victorian body, and Chaplin's "modern body".