Dva eseje o komedii – Meredith George (2013)

George Meredith: Essay on Comedy and the Application of the Comic Spirit Alena Dvořáková: Study on Meredith's Essay on Comedy To laugh or not to laugh? That is the question that the Victorian novelist George Meredith seeks to unravel in the now-classic Essay on Comedy from 1877, which is presented here to readers for the first time in an annotated Czech translation. The essay is an entertaining polemic directed against the lifeless values of Victorian society, particularly against the emphasis on seriousness, narrowly defined social utility, and the ideal of femininity based on gender inequality. As a counterbalance, Meredith defends the comic in theater and society: "there are themes and individuals with whom it is advisable to deal exclusively in a comic spirit." The accompanying study by Alena Dvořáková places the essay in the context of English and Western European literature on laughter and the comic and thoroughly analyzes Meredith's approach to comedy. Alena Dvořáková (born 1973 in Prague) is an Anglicist, literary critic, and translator. She focuses primarily on Victorian literature, contemporary Anglophone prose, and its translations into Czech. She is the author of numerous critical and literary scholarly articles and reviews, and she translated Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree into Czech (Argo, 2012).