Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Chapter 1: Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon
1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy
2. Parabasis, Plot, and the Directionality of the Text
3. Affecting the Audience: Knights, Clouds, and the Feel of Comedy
Part 1:
Wasps
Chapter 2: A Touch of Class: The Enduring Texture of Aristophanic Comedy
1. Converging Identities: Bdelycleon and Aristophanes between Parabasis and Plot
2. Contest of Cloaks: Restaging the First Clouds
3. The Daemons in the Details: Sensing the Cratinean Fashion
4. Aristophanic Fabric and Comic Canonicity
5. Conclusions
Chapter3: Emotional Rescue and Generic Demotion: Old Comedians and Tragedy’s Ragged Audience
1. Intersecting Affects: Tragic Love as Comic Disease
2. Anger and the Aesthetics of Alienation
3. Wrapping Walls: Affective Mimesis and Proto-Canonical Therapy
4. Ragged Feelings: The Comic Audience as a Tragic Parent
5. Conclusions
Chapter 4: The Broken Net: Comic Failure and Its Consequences
1. An Iambic Erinys: Cratinus, Affect, and Tragic Havoc
2. Aesopic Agonistics: Fables and Comic Redress
3. Undoing Failure: Dire Dancing and Ersatz Liberation
4. Conclusions
Part 2:
Clouds
Chapter 5: Aristophanes’ Electra Complex and the Future of Comedy
1. Aristophanes’ Oresteia
2. The Comic Stage as Tragic Classroom: The Audience Meets Socrates (and Eupolis)
3. Stripping Strepsiades: Socrates, Eupolis, Clytemnestra
4. Revision as Revenge: Stolen Cloaks and Suffocating Sons
5. Conclusions
Epilogue
1. “Fail Better”
2. Canonicity: Reenactment, Literary Affections, Enduring Objects
3. Affect: Touch, Vibrant Objects, Intertextuality
Synopses
Bibliography
Index