Introduction : comedy and the irresponsible self
Don Quixote's Old and New Testaments
Shakespeare and the pathos of rambling
How Shakespeare's "irresponsibility" saved Coleridge
Isaac Babel and the dangers of exaggeration
Saltykov-Shchedrin's subversion of hypocrisy
Anna Karenina and characterisation
Italo Svevo's unreliable comedy
Giovanni Verga's comic sympathy
Joseph Roth's empire of signs
Bohumil Harabal's comic world
J.F. Powers and the priests
Jonathan Franzen and the "social novel"
Tom Wolfe's shallowness, and the problem of information
Salman Rushdie's nobu novel
Coetzec's disgrace : a few skeptical thoughts
Saul Bellow's comic style
V.S. Pritchett and English comedy
