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Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction
Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.
Innocence and Loss
A fierce national outcry for righteously waging war has long dominated American culture. From at least the wildly popular Spanish-American War and the US military invasion of the Philippines that infuriated Mark Twain, right up to the current Global War on Terrorism, this is a deadly, dark current coursing throughout American history. Meanwhile, dissenting analyses of the “patriotic gore” have until recently been paid scant attention in the popular media. Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which “the compulsive redeployment of innocence” in the launching, cheering, and retelling of America’s wars “endlessly defers a national reckoning,” as the editors astutely state in their introduction. The works in this collection reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed.
Ruth Page
In Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work, the Chicago ballerina emerges as a highly original choreographer who, in her art, sought the iconoclastic as she transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. In the process of discovering the woman in the work, the book also offers encounters with an international cast of dancers, composers, visual artists, and companies.
New Women's Writing
The uptake of women’s writing as a distinct genre in literature since the 1960s has been rapid and multifarious. This development has fuelled a generation of literary and cultural studies, and can be seen in the growing influence of women’s and gender studies even in literary studies programs. The study of women’s writing has alerted literature to crucial social, political and cultural problems with which the discipline must continue to grapple. New Women’s Writing addresses this legacy and reflects upon the following questions: What is a critical history of women’s writing? How has women’s writing challenged literature’s rigid disciplinary construction? How can we derive a distinct philosophy of women’s writing and literary studies? How does an engagement with women’s writing contribute to a literary understanding of the complex politics of literature? This book is designed to interest both the seasoned scholar of women’s writing, as well as fledgling scholars who wish to grapple with the broad concept of women’s writing and its manifestations in the twentieth century and thereafter.
Decadence in the Age of Modernism
The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifa...
Black Oxen
Black Oxen unites such unlikely topics as medical rejuvenation treatments, eugenics, American youth culture, and cross-generational relationships. The beautiful American widow of a Hungarian count, Mary Zattiany is fifty-eight years old; after receiving experimental “rejuvenation treatments” and returning to America, however, she is mistaken for a woman in her twenties, and falls in love with a much younger man. Set in an era fixated on youth, beauty, and pleasure, but focusing on the experiences of an aging woman, Black Oxen offers a unique and unsettling view of the Jazz Age. Black Oxen was written in a burst of mental energy after Gertrude Atherton herself received an experimental anti-aging treatment; the introduction and appendices to this edition explore parallels between Atherton’s medical treatment and that of her rejuvenated protagonist, as well as provide selections from other contemporary writings on aging, science, and the role of women in the 1920s. Stills and posters from the 1924 film adaptation are also included.
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers
This collection is the first to focus on the transgressive and transformative power of American female humorists. It explores the work of authors and comediennes such as Carolyn Wells, Lucille Clifton, Mary McCarthy, Lynne Tillman, Constance Rourke, Roz Chast, Amy Schumer and Samantha Bee, and the ways in which their humor challenges gendered norms and assumptions through the use of irony, satire, parody, and wit. The chapters draw from the experiences of women from a variety of racial, class, and gender identities and encompass a variety of genres and comedic forms including poetry, fiction, prose, autobiography, graphic memoir, comedic performance, and new media. Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers will appeal to a general educated readership as well as to those interested in women’s and gender studies, humor studies, urban studies, American literature and cultural studies, and media studies.
The Female Complaint
The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how...
Self-Made Women in the 1920s United States
Women of the 1920s led a revolt against the old standards of womanhood that were dominating US culture. Flappers and feminists, they spoke and acted out, inspiring other women to follow. This book analyzes the work of eleven important 1920s female authors who chronicled this revolt: Anzia Yezierska, Anita Loos, Mae West, Josephine Lovett, Nella Larsen, Mourning Dove, Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, and Dorothy Parker. These trailblazers wrote counter-narratives to the sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia women faced during the Jazz Age. The author brings their novels, poems, plays, film scenarios, and blues lyrics into conversation with each other for the first time to show different approaches female readers could take to become autonomous individuals and full citizens. The works also encouraged readers to maintain supportive relationships with other progressive women. The author argues these works presented female readers with examples of how they could act individually and collectively to attain the political power, social status, economic independence, sexual freedom, and artistic recognition they deserved.
