Auctor Ludens: Essays on Play in Literature

Front Cover
Gerald Guinness, Andrew Hurley
John Benjamins Publishing, Jan 1, 1986 - Literary Criticism - 204 pages
This is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Of course, practice presupposes theory, but here the editors choose to keep general theoretical assumptions under cover rather then force them into explicitness. The contributors to this volume were given free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught their fancy. The absence of a predetermined theoretical framework has resulted in an idiosyntractic volume on the different forms of play.

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Contents

Authors at Play
1
Brecht and the Scientific Spirit of Playfulness
25
Chaucers The Millers Tale
37
Auctor Ludens
47
Acts of Willful Play by Walter Isle 33
75
PlayTranslations edited by Gerald Guinness 16
91
Literature of Love by Frank Warnke 99 66
99
The Folklore of Comedy
113
Some Observations on Rhyme
127
Playing for Life in Donnes Elegies and Songs
137
The Games of Consciousness in The Love Song
157
Games for Death and Two Maidens
171
Godots Games and Becketts Late Plays
183
PostLude
191
Note on Contributors
199
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About the author (1986)

Andrew Hurley is a professor of history at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Hurley is the author of Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 and Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis.

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