Comic Belles Lettres presents a significant rethinking of standard categories in scholarship on antebellum American humor—such as Old Southwest humorists and literary comedians—to provide a richer analysis of the comic writers of the period. By introducing an alternative aesthetic category, "comic belles lettres," and placing it in a transnational context, James E. Caron details a robust cross-cultural background that includes British and American conceptions of masculinity, the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, and the "man of feeling" trope.
Caron’s analysis uncovers a genealogy of comic characters with fresh readings of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that not only sweeps up other contemporary authors—Donald Mitchell and Frederic Cozzens—but also includes Joseph Addison’s famous character Sir Roger de Coverly. In addition, the investigation moves beyond fictional texts to demonstrate the reach of comic belles lettres by discussing two well-known historical figures, Lewis Gaylord Clark and William Thackeray, who embody the aesthetic’s signature figure, the Comic Gentleman. This segment delves into contemporary statements about the nature of comic art and comic laughter along with gendered concerns about the production of satire.
Comic Belles Lettres situates this unique mode of aesthetics within discursive practices of the 1850s—reviews, essays, and editorial decisions—that constitute important yet routinely overlooked aspects of the antebellum print archive, resulting in a new way of thinking about Anglo-American comic writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.