Précis

I Précis I Heidi Hanrahan University of North Carolina, Greensboro Buckley, F H. The Morality of Laughter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. vii + 240 pp. $29.95 Buckley writes, "The loss of a sense of humor has impoverished academic discourse , where nonsensical theories that would not survive the test of ridicule are now taken seriously. Before adopting a fashionable idea, we ought first to enquire whether it twigs our sense of humor." Indeed, in The Morality of Laughter, he argues for a new understanding and appreciation of humor that recognizes both its complexity and its value to society. "Comic virtues," he explains , "teach us how to extract joy from life, and their messages are necessarily complex. Rigid and narrow rules cannot possibly do justice to the endless variety of opportunities that life offers us for joy." Parts I and II discuss the author's theories of laughter, which he calls the "positive thesis" (there is no laughter without a butt of the joke and no butt without a message of inferiority ) and the closely related "normative thesis" (our laughter indicates a true superiority over the inferior butt). Here Buckley also looks at machine theory (which "fails to recognize man's humanity") and modern art, architecture, and cities (which "conspired to produce an inhuman wasteland because we forgot to laugh at ugliness"). Part III examines the experience of laughter and asks why its messages are sometimes ignored or misread. Buckley ends with a move towards broader philosophical implications, positing that through laughter we might "seek an integration of religious, aesthetic, and moral dimensions , which since Kierkegaard have seemed fragmented." Hodgkins, Christopher. Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. ix + 290 pp. $37.50 Hodgkins argues that for over four hundred years, the British empire found both its strength and weakness in the Protestant imagination, which gave it its "main paradigms for domination and possession, but also, paradoxically, its chief language of anti-imperial dissent." From Spenser to Kipling and beyond, British literature shows a "strange consistency" of themes, including worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy , apostasy, and doom. Reforming Empire moves from the Renaissance to 349 ELT 46 : 3 2003 1945, examining the discourse of empire through three specific types of "binding ": unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. Chapters one through three discuss religion's power to bind together, focusing on works including Cymbeline , The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, and even texts by Kipling and Conrad. Chapter Four considers the subordination of colonized people, with special attention paid to Pocahontas and John Rolfe's marriage, Jonson's Masque of Blackness, the sermons of early Virginia, and Behn's Oroonoko. Chapter Five looks at religious conscience and the anxieties of empire , with an eye towards Herbert, More, Milton, and Swift. Chapter six considers the late empire's suspicion of "trusteeship," specifically reflected in Browning, Tennyson, Kipling, Conrad, Forster, and Waugh. Hodgkins next moves to an examination of Anglicanism's break with imperialism, as represented by C. S. Lewis, who exemplifies English Protestantism's return to an "Augustan and Christian humanist critique of empire." Hodgkins concludes by positioning his text in today's post-9/11 world, suggesting that the days of imperialism and accompanying discourse might not be gone for good. He writes, "If the past is any indicator... the next imperial Beast rising from the earth will present itself as a contemporary liberationist lamb, speaking our language, our excellent postcolonial language, of peace and selfdetermination and diversity and interconnection. The crucial question now, as always, is whom we must control or displace, dispossess or destroy in order to reach the City." Izenberg, Gerald N. Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, and Kandinsky Through World War I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xi + 257 pp. Paper $20.00 Izenberg opens his book reminding readers of the early modernist concern with both recovering a true sense of self and reuniting that self with the world and truth. Wanting to complicate this idea, though, Izenberg dips into the life and works of three artists, Mann, Wedekind and Kandinsky, asking what difference masculine anxiety made to their search for...