Nonsense
by
What is Nonsense? I know when you do not ask me. —Edward Strachey In his introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense, Hugh Haughton comments, “Nonsense is a bit of a problem” (1988, 2). Haughton is alluding to a set of semantic and literary “difficulties” that have surrounded nonsense since the term came into common usage in the seventeenth century, when the word was used mostly in its literal sense, meaning “that which makes no sense” or that which is “worthless” (OED). Over the next two hundred years, a new meaning emerged, referring to a particular literary mode or genre. The discussion of nonsense as a genre was pioneered by Elizabeth Sewell in her seminal The Field of Nonsense (1952), in which she works exclusively with the poems of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll and posits that nonsense can be identified by a playful tension between sense and non-sense. Wim Tigges worked to further refine this definition in his An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (1988). Critical discussions that broach the topic suggest subcategories such as “literary” nonsense and “folk” nonsense (Heyman 2007). Some attempt to describe a canon ostensibly composed of a sort of “pure” literary nonsense; in Tigges’s (1988)...
This essay may be found on page 133 of the printed volume.