Reginald McGinnis is Professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Essai sur l'origine de la mystification and coeditor, with Fayçal Falaky, of Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France.

John Vignaux Smyth is Professor of English at Portland State University. He is the author of The Habit of Lying.

• Introduction


• 1. Ridicule


• 2. Mock Ritual in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia


• 3. Mocking Priests in Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste


• 4. Mock Ritual and the Emergence of Objectivity in Madame Bovary


• 5. Mock Ritual and Medicine in Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas


• 6. The Duel as Privatized Mock Ritual


• 7. Charlie Hebdo: The Ambivalence of Mockery


• Summation


• Concluding Unscientific Postscript


• Bibliography


• Index

Mock Ritual in the Modern Era explores the complex interrelations between ritual and mockery. McGinnis and Smyth trace the evolution of "mock ritual' in various forms throughout the modern era, as found in literary, historical, and anthropological texts as well as encyclopedias, newspapers, and films.