Smile of Discontent
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€93.99
A01=Eileen Gillooly
Author_Eileen Gillooly
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=JBSF
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226294018
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 15 x 28mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 1999
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
