The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense

The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense is the first comprehensive treatment of its subject across historical periods, languages, cultures, and theoretical frameworks. Written by scholars in a range of disciplines from philosophy to music as well as literary critics and linguists, it provides the first overview of nonsense as a vital dimension of human creativity, drawing on insights from theology to queer studies, from India to Russia, and from Ancient Greece to the late modernism of the twentieth century. Responding to a growing interest in nonsense within the academy and reflecting the diversity of understandings that the term inspires, this book aims to advance nonsense as a developing critical field, and to inspire new areas of research.

Anna Barton is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her previous publications include The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense (co-edited with James Williams) (2021), Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought: Forms of Freedom (2017), The Poetry of Christina Rossetti (2017), Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century (co-editor with Professor Andy Smith) (2016) and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam: A Reading Guide (2012).

James Williams is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. He is the author of Edward Lear (Liverpool University Press, 2018) and co-editor, with Matthew Bevis, of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016). He has published articles on Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, and Victorian comic verse.