Contents -- List of illustrations -- Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- CHAPTER ONE: Displacement, dualism and belief: exploring colonial comedy and fantasy -- CHAPTER TWO: Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture -- CHAPTER THREE: The game is up: British women's comic novels of the end of Empire -- CHAPTER FOUR: James Morier and the oriental picaresque -- CHAPTER FIVE: Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities -- CHAPTER SIX: Fairies on the veld: foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories -- CHAPTER SEVEN: Magic realism: humour across cultures -- CHAPTER EIGHT: Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress -- CHAPTER NINE: Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy -- CHAPTER TEN: Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking -- CHAPTER ELEVEN: Two hundred years of colonial laughter in Malta: Carnival and Pantomime in Malta under British rule -- CHAPTER TWELVE: Trickster-outlaws and the comedy of survival -- CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis -- CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Conclusion -- Selected bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.