Smile of Discontent – Humor,Gender, and Nineteenth–Century British Fiction (Paper) (Women in Culture and Society) - Softcover

Gillooly, Eileen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226294021 ISBN 13: 9780226294025

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humour has long been viewed as a repressed feature of 19th-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression. Gillooly shows how such humour became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine", then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humour she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald.

About this title

About the Author

Eileen Gillooly teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226294021
• ISBN 13: 9780226294025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288