This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines focuses on the specific forms of laughter, humour, comedy and satire in 20th–and 21st–century British literature and visual arts, and examines how writers and artists adopt, transform, redefine or subvert these modes while bearing in mind their often ambivalent dimension. The articles gathered here explore the relationship between laughter, satire and political criticism, and demonstrate that contemporary works generally no longer rely on the corrective function of satire and the exclusionary power of laughter, but favour a type of comedy that is fuelled by a humanist drive.
One-third of the issue is more specifically devoted to the work of Jonathan Coe : "a bringer of laughter".
References: LOL! Comedy, humour and satire in the literature and visual arts of the 20th and 21st centuries in Britain. Études britanniques contemporaines 51 (2016).