Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
Language: English
Published by Columbia University Press, 2024
Series: Book 84 of 86 - Film and Culture
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: Austin Goodwill 1101, Austin, TX, U.S.A.Austin Goodwill 1101
AbeBooks seller since May 21, 2021
Condition: Used - Good
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Book shows general signs of use and handling. May have light wear on the cover or edges and minimal writing or highlighting. Binding remains tight, and pages are clean and readable.
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- Title
- Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
- Author
- Hennefeld, Maggie
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Publication year
- 2024
- Condition
- good
- Binding
- Soft cover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0231213298
- ISBN 13
- 9780231213295
- Series
- Book 84 of 86: Film and Culture
Shortlisted, 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize
Shortlisted, 2025 Eiffel Award - Cinema Interpretation, Eiffel Foundation
Finalist, 2024 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate―or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?
Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.
Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.
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