The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense is the first comprehensive treatment of its subject across historical periods, languages, cultures, and theoretical frameworks. Written by scholars in a range of disciplines from philosophy to music as well as literary critics and linguists, it provides the first overview of nonsense as a vital dimension of human creativity, drawing on insights from theology to queer studies, from India to Russia, and from Ancient Greece to the late modernism of the twentieth century. Responding to a growing interest in nonsense within the academy and reflecting the diversity of understandings that the term inspires, this book aims to advance nonsense as a developing critical field, and to inspire new areas of research.