On subjects directly relevant to comic dimensions in American literature, performance, and cultural life, the 2017 publications reviewed here include forty-five books and more than eighty articles and chapters. Though the year's business was brisk and diverse, quirks and patterns in it can be suggested.
First, the year's efforts at cutting-edge literary and cultural theory continued to show unease with the comic as a presence in what are construed in these studies as high-serious texts. Rarely venturing beyond Bakhtin, Freud, and Bergson (if they cite anyone at all), “high theory” commentaries followed the familiar practice of avoiding or isolating moments or strains of laughter that could contribute to a text's overall vitality and thematic depth. Second, beyond the usual attention to Mark Twain, the year saw a dearth of discussions of American comic discourse in the Gilded Age, of twentieth- and twenty-first-century wit and humor in print (e.g., novels, short...
