Research Catalog

Title

Untamed and unabashed : essays on women and humor in British literature / Regina Barreca.

Author

Barreca, Regina.

Publication

Detroit : Wayne State University Press, ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

191 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Series Statement

Humor in life and letters series

Uniform Title

Humor in life and letters

Subjects

• Women and literature > Great Britain
• English fiction > Women authors > History and criticism
• English wit and humor > Women authors > History and criticism
• Humorous stories, English > Women authors > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-185) and index.

Contents

Introduction "Untamed and unabashed" : towards a theory of women and humor in literature -- Dearly loving a good laugh : humor in Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen -- "I'm no angel" : humor and mutiny in Jane Eyre and Villette -- Laughter as reproof, refutation, and revenge in The mill on the Floss and Middlemarch -- "The joke or agony" : Elizabeth Bowen's comic vision -- The ancestral laughter of the streets : humor in Muriel Spark's earlier works -- "Let us now praise fallen women" : hate and humor in Fay Weldon's novels -- Metaphor-into-narrative : being "very careful with words" in text by women writers.

ISBN

• 0814321364
• 9780814321362

LCCN

93030645

OCLC

• ocm28633809
• 28633809
• SCSB-2010726

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library