Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy

This text seeks to offer a new theory of narrative in its uncovering of how conversations and comic interchanges between lovers in stories create an intimacy and happiness of the everyday. Drawing on a diverse body of theory (from sociolinguistics to philosophy to literary criticism) and reading an unexpectedly eclectic group of texts (works by Shakespeare and Tolstoy appear beside Casablanca and I Love Lucy) Kay Young explores how narrative couples play together, struggle together, and return to one another to experience what it means to be in a relationship over time.