Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

by Eileen Gillooly

Book Overview

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-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 humor became,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226294021
• ISBN13: 9780226294025
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"