Tragic and Comic Forms in the Novel

FAIN: FS-10120-75

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
James R. Kincaid (Project Director: January 1975 to present)

To explore the ways traditional forms and values of comedy and tragedy are embodied, modified, or parodied in some of the great novels of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Austen and Melville to Camus and Heller. Extensive consideration will be given to various aesthetic and theoretical problems; the nature and development of comedy and tragedy, the hostility between tragedy and the novel form.