| Description |
191 pages ; 24 cm |
| Series |
Humor in life and letters series |
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Humor in life and letters.
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| Contents |
1. Introduction - "Untamed and Unabashed": Towards a Theory of Women and Humor in Literature -- 2. Dearly Loving a Good Laugh: Humor in Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen -- 3. "I'm No Angel": Humor and Mutiny in Jane Eyre and Villette -- 4. Laughter as Reproof, Refutation, and Revenge in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch -- 5. "The Joke or Agony": Elizabeth Bowen's Comic Vision -- 6. The Ancestral Laughter of the Streets: Humor in Muriel Spark's Earlier Works -- 7. "Let Us Now Praise Fallen Women": Hate and Humor in Fay Weldon's Novels -- 8. Metaphor-into-Narrative: Being "Very Careful with Words" in Texts by Women Writers |
| Summary |
Barreca asserts that much of women's comic play has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation, allowing women to gain perspective by ridiculing the implicit insanities of a patriarchal culture. Using detailed persuasive new readings of various works of each of her chosen authors, she shows how the straightjacket of conventional femininity is challenged, confronted, and finally, thrown off |
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Each of the essays argues that conservative critics have misread and misunderstood the importance of humor in the works of these women authors, and that women's humor serves to explode conventions oppressive to women and to offer women readers a critique of, and an alternative perspective on, the dominant cultural ideologies that contain and oppress them |
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The book concludes that these authors strategically deployed humor, coded in forms that women readers - but not men readers - would recognize and understand, as a means of educating and empowering those women readers |
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This volume demonstrates that comedy can effectively channel anger and rebellion by first making them appear to be acceptable and temporary phenomena, and then by harnessing the released energies, rather than dispersing them. This kind of comedy, which is at the heart of Untamed and Unabashed, terrifies those who hold order dear. It should |
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In Untamed and Unabashed, Regina Barreca, noted authority on women and humor, examines the use of humor in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. She analyzes the ways that each writer uses comedic devices, especially those involving language itself, and discusses the gendered basis of their humor, providing a provocative feminist perspective on gender and comedy |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-185) and index |
| Subject |
English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
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English wit and humor -- History and criticism.
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English wit and humor -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
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Humorous stories, English -- History and criticism.
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Humorous stories, English -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
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Women and literature -- Great Britain.
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| LC no. |
93030645 |
| ISBN |
0814321364 (alk. paper) |
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