Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature

By Susan Stewart

Book Overview

From a "comic strip" papyrus dating from Egypt's New Kingdom to the works of Stein, Joyce, and Barth, "nonsense" texts reveal a set of possibilities as rich and complex as the more conventional system of "making sense" from which they are derived. Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams, code languages, and other texts, Susan Stewart explores the labyrinthine relationships between common sense and nonsense-- and presents an original contribution to the fields of folklore, literary theory, anthropology, and sociology by analyzing nonsense within an expansive context of the social manufacture of order and disorder.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801822580
• ISBN13: 9780801822582
• Release Date: December 1979
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Sense about Nonsense

This book is very well written, scholarly, lucid and informative. The many references to well-known works help to clarify some of the more abstract concepts.