Image descriptions:
Image one: E-book titled Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture (2003) - synopsis: Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some “traditions” dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter.
Image two: E-book titled The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015) - synopsis: In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
