This page explains how TNoC works: what it is (and is not), how the taxonomy is defined, how novel and author guides stay comparable, and how to cite and track revisions over time.
The Novel of Comedy is a digital atlas and a critical cartography of modern comic fiction (1900–today). It maps works through a stable vocabulary so they can be compared without flattening their differences.
Authority starts with limits. TNoC avoids three common traps.
TNoC does not aim to crown “the funniest novels”. It describes how comedy works, under which constraints, in which environments.
No Top 100. Yes: mechanisms, tone, and lineage.
TNoC is editorially accountable: each page follows a fixed structure, states its taxonomy path, and is revised over time.
Consistency + traceability over improvisation.
The project is built to last: coherent, legible, and revisable.
TNoC’s taxonomy is designed to be human-readable and machine-usable, without becoming a spreadsheet culture.
Modifiers help precision without multiplying categories endlessly.
Wilt might be mapped as: Comedy of Everyday → Frustration → Midlands Lab, with environment UK · technical college · pre-Thatcher England, plus flags like campus, institution meltdown.
The point is not to “label” the book but to make connections legible across the atlas.
Guides remain comparable because they follow fixed scaffolds. The structure is a method.
Each novel guide follows a fixed ten-chapter matrix (the “Wilt-10” scaffold), identical from one book to the next.
Same headings → meaningful comparisons → less hand-wavy criticism.
Author profiles follow their own stable matrix: how humour works across a career, through-lines, devices, relation to language and society.
The work remains primary: author pages serve reading, not mythology.
TNoC aims for clear, revisable judgement: what is observed in the text, what is inferred, what is debated.
Some works are hybrids or shift current over time. TNoC accepts borderline mapping: the goal is not purity, but usefulness.
When a page changes, the change is logged through versioning.
A reference site must be citable. TNoC pages show a stable ID, a page version, and a “Last revised” date.
TNoC grows by deepening corpora, clarifying Labs, and refining connections — not by speed-publishing.
The baseline vocabulary and page metadata used across the atlas. This is the “institution layer” that makes pages comparable and citable.
Recommended fields strengthen trust without turning a guide into a bureaucracy.