COMEDY

GLOSSARY 145therefore, seek to relate comic forms to the social, cultural, andpolitical movements of their day in an effort to show the investmentand interrelatedness of one beside the other.Humours the humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—werefour fluids believed to be essential to human health, the preponderanceof one fluid over the others possessing the ability to effect personality.The humoral system was developed by Galen in the first century AD,and remained influential in medicine through the Midde Ages andearly modern periods. The comedy of the humours, associated largelywith the work of Ben Jonson, used the humoral system as a basis forcharacterization.Materialism a belief that ideas and societies develop as a result of theirmaterial conditions and environments, in opposition to idealism,which holds that ideas or concepts come first and are acted upon todevelop material conditions. Materialism is especially interested inclass and economic relationships as a determining factor in humaninteraction. This term is associated with Marxist and other forms ofsocialist thinking.Meta-narrative any narrative that claims to be able to explain all aspectsof existence within its own terms, Christianity for example.Modernism a literary and artistic movement of the first half of thetwentieth century that experimented with various modes of aestheticrepresentation, rejecting the figural or realist genres of the nineteenthcentury.New Comedy the term applied to the comedy of the Greek dramatistMenander (c. 342–c. 291 BC), and used to differentiate his work fromthat of his predecessor Aristophanes (see ‘Old Comedy’). NewComedy uses stock characters and situations and is usually set aroundthe affairs and intrigues of a middle-class household. Plots revolvearound intrigues of sex and money and conclude with the restorationof harmonious relationships. The Roman dramatists Plautus (c.254–184 BC) and Terence (c. 190 or 180–159 BC) used Greekprototypes in the composition of their own New Comedy, and NewComedy forms inspired the English city comedies of the seventeenthcentury.New historicism like ‘historicism’, a critical school that believes in thereconstruction of context as an essential aspect of understandingliterary text. The ‘new’ in ‘new historicism’ comes from its attempts