Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth

This book aims to increase our understanding of the comic in the work of three major contemporary North American writers. It tries, on the one hand, to do justice to the specificity of the oeuvre of each of the writers it deals with and, on the other to come to grips with the comic as a theoretical problem of the criticism of much contemporary fiction. The term “comic sense” implies both a quality of the fiction discussed in this book and particular way of reading this fiction.
Pughe concentrates mainly on the outstanding texts of his three Robert Coover’s A Night at the Movies and The Public Burning, Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show, The Franchiser and The Magic Kingdom and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. His readings are based on a reconsideration of traditional and modern theories of the comic and show that the literary significance of the texts discussed here is closely interwined with the authors’ and their readers’ – “comic sense”.