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Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot about an industrializing rural proletariat, Beyond Tula--subtitled \"a Soviet pastoral\"--actually appeared in the official Soviet press in 1931. This novel offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet \"production\" prose.

In discussing Iraqi existentialist prose works, current research focuses mainly on stories from the 1950s and maintains that Iraqi writers were interested in existentialist works, especially from the late 1940s onward. This article argues that not only were Iraqi writers already familiar with Western existentialist ideas in the mid-1940s and incorporating them into their literary works as early as 1946, but they also adapted them to criticize the processes of modernity in post-WWII Baghdad. The article discusses the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and Caligula (1944) on the Iraqi author 'Adnan Rauf's short story \"Duda\" ([phrase omitted], \"Worm\") from 1946 in light of the atom bomb detonated over Hiroshima about a year before its publication. It shows how these European works were instrumentalized and appropriated by Rauf for his criticism of his surroundings and the characteristics of modernity in the urban space. Furthermore, through a stylistic and thematic exploration, the article sheds light on Rauf, who has so far not received the scholarly attention he deserves, in spite of the fact that he is considered one of the pioneers of the modern Iraqi short story.

Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea each create a liminal space wherein the traditional absurd in Camusian sense is both discernable and modified. While the male-female interactions in the novels correspond to the interactive nature of the moment of absurd recognition, the female characters of both novels manifest the same sense of lucidity and constant consciousness that constitutes the essence of absurd heroism. Thus, by casting female heroes as opposed to male ones, Rhys's aforementioned novels introduce the notion of gender and heterogeneity into the absurd. As such, Sisyphus's labor-ridden and mainly corporeal struggle, no longer the sole representative of the absurd, is counterpointed with that of female characters such as Sasha, Antoinette, Christophine, and Amelie whose absurd experiences are more Medusan than Sisyphean.

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch - 22 (1961) details the absurdity of war and extensively makes use of humour to do so. Yet the structural role this characteristic humour fulfils has rarely been explored in depth. In this article, I focus on a specific type of humour, namely absurdist humour, which is traditionally defined as a form of humour where resolution of the underlying incongruity cannot be obtained. Drawing on cognitive theories of humour and on the concept of characterisation categories, the article goes on to describe the close-knit relationship between absurdist humour and characterisation in the novel. The analysis highlights the structural importance of absurdist humour both for the narrative structure of the novel as well as for a reader’s understanding and interpretation of Catch - 22 . The article illustrates that resolution can be achieved, contrary to the generally espoused viewpoint in humour studies, and that it is realised at the moment of interpretation. Understanding the mechanisms of absurdist humour, then, benefits our understanding of Heller’s classic as it forces readers to more closely consider the message conveyed by the novel.

This article presents a study of the dark humor genre in the written work of Roberto Fontanarrosa, an Argentine writer very famous in Latin America, in reference to the comic strip Boogie, the oily. In Boogie we observe a use of humor based on a naked, open and highly reflective criticism toward to the liquid contemporary culture through the creation of a protagonist who reflects in himself all of the vices and evils of society. As methodology, this paper employs a literature review and qualitative content analysis, taking as reference ten comics of Boogie, the oily and analyzing their connotative and denotative messages. In conclusion this paper infers that a comic can serve as a vehicle to express reality by means of absurdity and irony. Consequently, Boogie shows us the culture of tolerance that human beings have taken with regard to the deformation of values of today’s world.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.