SOURCE: Butler, Andrew M. “Terry Pratchett and the Comedic Bildungsroman.” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, no. 67 (summer 1996): 56-62.

In the following essay, using Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais as context, Butler argues that Pratchett's novels mix a carnival atmosphere with the concept of the bildungsroman to accomplish change in both the characters and the world they inhabit.

It would be extremely interesting to write the history of humour. We would have to pay special attention to time: adventure time, carnival time, fairy-tale time, and of course, comic timing. And as time is relative to space, then we need to pay attention to space as well. Think of the strategies of comedy: reversal, juxtaposition, imitation, exaggeration. All of these have a spatial element. But here and now, I wish to write of only one time and one space of humour: that occupied by Terry Pratchett from the mid-1980s to...