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.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies--whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

"A Study Guide for Lorrie Moore's ""How to Become a Writer"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs."

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women’s humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest. This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy. Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raúl Pérez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.

This edited volume brings together scholars of comedy to assess how political comedy encounters neoliberal themes in contemporary media. Central to this task is the notion of genre; under neoliberal conditions (where market logics motivate most actions) genre becomes “mixed.” Once stable, discreet categories such as comedy, horror, drama and news and entertainment have become blurred so as to be indistinguishable. The classic modern paradigm of comedy/tragedy no longer holds, if it ever did. Moreover, as politics becomes more economic and less moral or normative under neoliberalism, we are able to see new resistance to comedic genres that support neoliberal strategies to hide racial and gender injustice such as unlaughter, ambiguity, and anti-comedy. There is also an increasing interest with comedy as a form of entertainment on the political right following both Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the U.S. Several essays confront this conservative comedy and place it in context of the larger humor history of these debates over free speech and political correctness. For comedians too, entry into popular media now follows the familiar neoliberal script of the celebration of self-help with the increasing admonishment of those who fail to win in market terms. Laughter plays an important role in shaming and valorizing (often at the same time!) the precarious subject in the aftermath of global recession. Doubling down on austerity, self-help policies and equivocation in the face of extremist challenges (right and left), politics foils the critical comedian’s attempt to satirize and parody its object. Characterized by ambiguity, mixed genre and the increasing use of anti-humor, political comedy mirrors the social and political world it mocks, parodies and celebrates often with lackluster results suggesting that the joke might be on us, as audiences.

Susan Koppelman Award Winner: “A juicy read for those who love the many ways female comics use their art to question the patriarchy.” —Bust Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren’t funny. But today’s funny women didn’t come out of nowhere. Fay Tincher’s daredevil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg’s sly twinkle, and Tina Fey’s acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women’s bodies and behaviors. Hysterical! Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field’s leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women’s comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women’s comedy. “An invaluable collection and a great read.” ?Journal of Popular Culture Winner of a Susan Koppelman Award for Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies, Popular and American Culture Associations (PACA), 2017

The De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies consolidates the cumulative contributions in theory and research on humor from 57 international scholars representing 21 different countries in the widest possible diversity of disciplines. It organizes research in a unique conceptual framework addressing two broad themes: the Essence of Humor and the Functions of Humor. Furthermore, scholars of humor have recognized that humor is not only a universal human experience, it is also inherently social, shared among people and woven into the fabric of nearly every type of interpersonal relationship. Scholars across all academic disciplines have addressed questions about the essence and functions of humor at different "levels of analysis" relating to how narrowly or broadly they conceptualize the social context of humor. Accordingly, the editors have organized each broad thematic section into four subsections defined by "level of analysis." The book first addresses questions about individual psychological processes and text properties, then moves to questions involving broader conceptualizations of the social context addressing humor and social relations, and humor and culture. By providing a comprehensive review of foundational work as well as new research and theoretical advancements across academic disciplines, the De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies will serve as the foremost authoritative research handbook for experienced humor scholars as well as an essential starting point for newcomers to the field, such as graduate students seeking to conduct their own research on humor. Further, by highlighting the interdisciplinary interest of new and emerging areas of research the book identifies and defines directions for future research for scholars from every discipline that contributes to our understanding of humor.

Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This features thematic entries as well as biographies of female writers whose works were originally published in Spanish or Portuguese, and who have had an impact on literary, political, and social studies. Focusing on drama, poetry, and fiction, this work includes authors who have published at least three literary texts that have had a significant impact on Latin American literature and culture. Each entry is followed by extensive bibliographic references, including primary and secondary sources. Coverage consists of critical appreciation and analysis of the writers' works. Brief biographical data is included, but the main focus is on the meanings and contexts of the works as well as their cultural and political impact. In addition to author entries, other themes are explored, such as humor in contemporary Latin American fiction, lesbian literature in Latin America, magic, realism, or mother images in Latin American literature. The aim is to provide a unique, thorough, scholarly survey of women writers and their works in Latin America. This Encyclopedia will be of interest to both to the student of literature as well as to any reader interested in understanding more about Latin American culture, literature, and how women have represented gender and national issues throughout the centuries.

Encompassing a broad definition of the topic, this Companion provides a survey of the literary magazine from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. It offers a comprehensive theorization of the literary magazine in the wake of developments in periodical studies in the last decade, bringing together a wide variety of approaches and concerns. With its distinctive chronological and geographical scope, this volume sheds new light on the possibilities and difficulties of the concept of the literary magazine, balancing a comprehensive overview of key themes and examples with greater attention to new approaches to magazine research. Divided into three main sections, this book offers: • Theory—it investigates definitions and limits of what a literary magazine is and what it does. • History and regionalism—a very broad historical and geographic sweep draws new connections and offers expanded definitions. • Case studies—these range from key modernist little magazines and the popular middlebrow to pulp fiction, comics, and digital ventures, widening the ambit of the literary magazine. The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine offers new and unforeseen cross-connections across the long history of literary periodicals, highlighting the ways in which it allows us to trace such ideas as the “literary” as well as notions of what magazines do in a culture.