Conceição PEREIRA (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Anthologies of Nonsense


Anthologies of poetry, whether they contain a single genre or cover a particular period of time, have a strong tradition in the UK and in the USA. This paper will focus on anthologies of nonsense literature written in the twentieth century. The first such anthology was collected by Carolyn Wells in 1902 and includes mainly eighteenth and nineteenth century English language authors. I will consider ten other nonsense anthologies, spanning from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. All of these anthologies include texts written by authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they present different periods of time; one begins with Aristophanes, others with texts by twelfth, fifteenth or sixteenth century authors, and only one does not include texts belonging to the oral tradition. In some anthologies nonsense is viewed as a very old phenomenon or as having always existed. On the contrary, the anthologies that only include texts from the nineteenth century onwards argue that nonsense literature began in the Victorian period with Edward Lear. The notion of nonsense as typically British is common to all anthologies, even those published in French and German. It is also relevant that in every volume an introduction is included, often along with a preface or afterword.
Taken as a whole, the nonsense selections in these anthologies imply an overall definition of the genre, which implies the formulation of an inaccurate theory of nonsense. Such a theory is unable to produce a suitable definition of nonsense as a concept or as a genre. This generalization explains the diversity of texts chosen by the collectors of nonsense anthologies as well as the few repetitions of authors and texts, except for Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. I will explore the consequences of such diversity of authors and texts for the construction of the genre of nonsense, along with a description of the theories implied in the introductions. I will also mention a recent anthology of Indian nonsense published in English and the project in process of an anthology of world nonsense.