Daniel Norman
'Coleridge's Humour in The Watchman'
Norman, Daniel
Authors
Abstract
This essay seeks to challenge Coleridge's (and some subsequent critics') retrospective accounts of the glib naivety of The Watchman's humour, by arguing that his jokes reveal a careful and considered approach to the dissemination of his ideas. It identifies several types of humour employed within the work, examining both the articles Coleridge himself contributed, and the manner in which he arranged the contributions of others. Such an examination is only possible in full view of the contemporary periodical context, to which Coleridge is quite clearly responding. By adapting, and at times undermining, the forms of humour popular amongst the readerships of other periodicals, Coleridge's own jokes reveal his pervasive attention to his relationship with his audience. The Watchman consistently wrong-foots its reader with its subtle and provocative wit, and in so doing it displays a conception of the function and purpose of humour that Coleridge would gradually refine in the years to come.
Citation
Norman, D. (2019). 'Coleridge's Humour in The Watchman'. Romanticism, 25(2), 117-128. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2019.0413
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Jul 31, 2019 |
Deposit Date | Apr 30, 2019 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 14, 2019 |
Journal | Romanticism |
Print ISSN | 1354-991X |
Electronic ISSN | 1750-0192 |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 25 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 117-128 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2019.0413 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1297637 |
Files
Journal Article
(93 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Published Journal Article
(93 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© Daniel Norman. The online version of this article is published as Open Access
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits commercial use, distribution
and reproduction provided the original work is cited.
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search