ABSTRACT
In 1830 and 1831 when Thomas Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, he slowly, layer by layer, created a book that departed radically from any that he or anyone else had written before. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle developed a process of transcending seemingly incongruous statements through a technique he called the "inverse sublime. Carlyle's humor becomes a method of vision, through transcendence to a higher plane, that he hopes to impart to his readers. In earlier ages, humor arose not from incongruity but from superiority. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter wrote an influential theory of humor in which he equates the vantage point of the humorist with that of the religious person. Carlyle's humor is a pervasive attitude composed in part of aggression, but he used his humor as an aesthetic device to recreate the world in his works. In Sartor Resartus, humor occurs not in incidental flashes, but as an important element in understanding the work in its entirety.
