A Cultural History of Comedy

by Andrew McConnell Stott (Series Editor), Eric Weitz (Series Editor), Michael Ewans (Volume 1 Editor)

How has our expression, use and reception of comedy developed from antiquity to the present day? What role has it occupied in Western culture, and what can it tell us about how society has changed?

In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. The volumes describe various manifestations of comedy, its use in religion, theatre and literature, and its historical and philosophical significance.

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.


Themes (and chapter titles) are: Form; Theory; Praxis; Identities; The Body; Politics and Power; Laughter; and Ethics.

The page extent is approximately 1,824pp with c. 250 illustrations.

The six volumes cover:

Volume 1: A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity (500 BCE - 1000 AD)
Edited by Michael Ewans (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Volume 2: A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages (1000 - 1400)
Edited by Martha Bayless (University of Oregon, USA)

Volume 3: A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age (1400 - 1650)
Edited by Andrew McConnell Stott (University of Southern California, USA)

Volume 4: A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800)
Edited by Elizabeth Kraft (University of Georgia, USA)

Volume 5: A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire (1800 - 1920)
Edited by Matthew Kaiser (University of California, Merced, USA)

Volume 6: A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age (1920 – present)
Edited by Louise Peacock (De Montfort University, UK)

1824 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Andrew McConnell Stott is the author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, which won the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography, and was a Guardian Best Book of the Year. The Poet and the Vampyre is his first book to be published in America. In 2011, Stott was named a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is a Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, SUNY.