Comedy : an annotated bibliography of theory and criticism

From Plato to Umber-to Eco comedy has been a subject of perennial interest. In the 1980s there have even been two attempts, one scholarly and one fictional, to recreate the "lost" book on comedy by Plato's pupil Aristotle: by Richard Janko in Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II, which also returns us to the ancient "Tractatus Coislinianus"; and by Eco in The Name of the Rose, where murder fails to prevent disclosure of the treatise (see items 216 and 274 below). So the time seemed propitious to gather and annotate the best that has been published about comedy in a bibliography of larger scope than the one by E. H. Mikhail, Comedy and Tragedy: A Bibliography of Critical Studies (Troy: Whitston, 1972), which included only about four hundred items. This book is intended to provide a better guide through the maze of comic theory and criticism than has hitherto existed.