ABSTRACT
That absurd writing was called “nonsense” in the nineteenth century, before nonsense resurfaced as literary “absurdism” in the twentieth century, marks a significant shift in nomenclature. It reflects the growing seriousness with which nonsense was taken at the turn of the century, from authors like Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Oscar Wilde, through Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, to Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee; and absurdism crossed the genres to include nonfiction and mixed-genre works as well as poetry and fiction. In absurdism’s nineteenth-century precursors, we discover in retrospect not only the so-called “nonsense” that entertained Victorian readers but also the sensicality of the absurd and, dare we say, the meaningfulness which philosophers of the absurd, like Alfred Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as the absurdist playwrights, have found in modernity. After contemplating the good fun in Carroll and Lear, I turn to Wilde as a pivotal nonsense-maker in the shift from Victorianism to the Modern (with occasional glances at those later writers). I then pause with Sitwell’s modernist work on the way to postmodern paralogics: her most serious work was directly associated with nineteenth-century nonsense, yet may be best characterized as postmodern.
