The Idler's Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures) - Softcover

Fiss, Laura Kasson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474497152 ISBN 13: 9781474497152

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Poking fun at Victorian social clubs became a way of asserting and redefining social belonging. At the turn of the century, amid intense social change, the club became the subject of sustained humour in the Idler magazine and its circle, from editors Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr to J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barry Pain, Israel Zangwill, and even P. G. Wodehouse. Rather than doing away with the club itself, these authors embraced the paradoxes of the club and re-defined it as a space of possibility. Their humorous, fictional clubs aided the social mobility of the authors who created them, who in turn served as models for the readers who might never cross the literal thresholds of Clubland.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Kasson Fiss (she/her) is Research Assistant Professor in Humanities at Michigan Technological University. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, and elsewhere.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474497152
• ISBN 13: 9781474497152
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288