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Being and naughtiness

Being and naughtiness
Being and naughtiness
This essay traces the ways in which Edward Lear’s limericks and other related nonsense texts proceed from word sounds and arbitrary forms to generate teasing effects of verisimilitude, giving them an ontological poise that precludes their being dismissed as mere unmeaning nonsense. Looking at these texts in relation to the more didactic children’s literature of the time, it argues that Lear’s nonsense works mark a modest linguistic turn, an ontology that would have been preposterous to Parmenides, as it names that which is not, but accords with Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable, who concludes that being is ‘all words, there’s nothing else’.
162-180
Oxford University Press
Brown, Daniel
9782df03-dbb1-45e9-b6f3-626f397ad0c3
Williams, James
Bevis, Matthew
Brown, Daniel
9782df03-dbb1-45e9-b6f3-626f397ad0c3
Williams, James
Bevis, Matthew

Brown, Daniel (2016) Being and naughtiness. In, Williams, James and Bevis, Matthew (eds.) Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry. Oxford, GB. Oxford University Press, pp. 162-180. (doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198708568.003.0008).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This essay traces the ways in which Edward Lear’s limericks and other related nonsense texts proceed from word sounds and arbitrary forms to generate teasing effects of verisimilitude, giving them an ontological poise that precludes their being dismissed as mere unmeaning nonsense. Looking at these texts in relation to the more didactic children’s literature of the time, it argues that Lear’s nonsense works mark a modest linguistic turn, an ontology that would have been preposterous to Parmenides, as it names that which is not, but accords with Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable, who concludes that being is ‘all words, there’s nothing else’.

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Accepted/In Press date: September 2015
Published date: 25 August 2016
Organisations: English

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 397249
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/397249
PURE UUID: cc8d0018-b04e-47a0-ad1c-0ee4ae656c40

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Date deposited: 23 Jun 2016 12:38
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 01:10

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Contributors

Author: Daniel Brown
Editor: James Williams
Editor: Matthew Bevis

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