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| Preface | |
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| Abbreviations | |
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| Introductory | |
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| The theoretical absurd: an introduction | |
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| The philosophical absurd | |
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| Jokes, humour, nonsense and the absurd | |
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| The socio-linguistic absurd | |
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| Antecedents to the absurd | |
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| From the ancients... | |
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| Madness: mysteries to Shakespeare | |
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| Nonsense, Swift and Sterne | |
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| Romantic grotesque to 'higher' realism and pre-Surrealist nonsense | |
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| Growth of the absurd | |
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| The twentieth century: towards the absurd | |
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| Introductory pointers | |
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| 'Post-Impressionists' in England | |
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| Avant-garde theory and practice | |
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| Disparate European prose: Western and Eastern proto-absurdism | |
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| Around the absurd I: twentieth-century absurdist practice | |
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| Fernando Pessoa and the 'pessimistic absurd' | |
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| Antonin Artaud and the 'cruelty' of the absurd | |
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| Camus and the Dostoevsky connection | |
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| Around the absurd II: the Theatre of the Absurd | |
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| Ionesco and others: the French-language scene | |
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| Pinter and others: the English-language scene | |
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| The East European scene | |
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| (Soviet) Russia: the OBERIU | |
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| (Cold-War) Poland and Czechoslovakia | |
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| Special authors | |
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| Daniil Kharms as minimalist-absurdist | |
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| A Kharms sketch | |
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| The Kharmsian canon | |
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| A poetics of extremism | |
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| Logic of the black miniature | |
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| Pursuing the red-haired man | |
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| Kharmsian others? | |
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| Franz Kafka: otherness in the labyrinth of absurdity | |
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| Kafka and the other(s) | |
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| Kafka in the other(s) | |
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| Falling and cawing in the labyrinth | |
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| Samuel Beckett's vessels, voices and shades of the absurd | |
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| In the wake of Kafka? | |
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| The prose | |
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| The drama | |
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| Further shades of the absurd | |
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| Flann O'Brien and the purloined absurd | |
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| The hydra-headed man | |
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| At Swim-Two-Birds: juvenile scrivenry as metafictional absurd? | |
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| The Third Policeman: questions, mysteries, answers | |
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| In conclusion | |
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| Beyond the absurd? | |
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| The prosaic absurd | |
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| Beyond the 'Theatre of the Absurd'? | |
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| Popular culture | |
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| That miscellaneous and ubiquitous absurd | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Bibliography | |
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| Index | |