Awards

• Commended for Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association 2019
• Long-listed for Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for Best Moving Image Book 2019
• Runner-up for Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies 2019

Overview

Full Product Details

9780231179478

Table of Contents

Reviews

Hennefeld's book represents a significant contribution to the field in its refreshing methodological combination of cultural analysis and feminist historiography. * NECSUS * This book's animated tone and savvy provocations [cause readers] to think about women's silent-era comedy in new, dynamic, and surprising ways...In addition, Specters of Slapstick offers a significant new critical approach to women's comedy for scholarship. * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies * Hennefeld's work will delightfully haunt, but intelligently entertain. Highly recommended. * Choice * Hennefeld's book concludes with a call to make visible the forgotten histories of feminist social struggle and of women's cultural visibility . Rather neatly, Specters of Slapstick offers an engrossing and energising example of that very work. -- Pamela Hutchinson * Sight & Sound * Hennefeld draws on hundreds of films to reveal the radical interest and specificity of the silent film comediennes who humorously ruptured themselves while negotiating the shifting place of women's bodies in cinema's early years. Forging a rigorous third way between killjoy refusal and unruly disruption using a Laughing Methodology to counter misogynist violence, this brilliant book illuminates the vital link between feminist laughter and the slow-burn pleasure of feminist thought. -- Karen Redrobe, University of Pennsylvania Hennefeld does a remarkable job of framing the politics of early film comedy in relation to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of laughter. This is a far-reaching study that will change our understanding of the history of early film slapstick and gender. -- Robert J. King, Columbia University Simultaneously hilarious and seriously incisive, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes is a dazzling demonstration of the way in which the female body in early film comedy is the privileged site for the display of the cinema's defamiliarization of the world. Hennefeld skillfully links the centrality of women in comic films of mobility and catastrophe to anxieties surrounding their rapidly changing social position. This is a marvelous analysis. -- Mary Ann Doane, University of California, Berkeley Named Best Silent Film Book of 2018 * Silent London *

Hennefeld does a remarkable job of framing the politics of early film comedy in relation to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophies of laughter. This is a far-reaching study that will change our understanding of the history of early film slapstick and gender.--Robert J. King, Columbia University Hennefeld draws on hundreds of films to reveal the radical interest and specificity of the silent film comediennes who humorously ruptured themselves while negotiating the shifting place of women's bodies in cinema's early years. Forging a rigorous third way between killjoy refusal and unruly disruption using a Laughing Methodology to counter misogynist violence, this brilliant book illuminates the vital link between feminist laughter and the slow-burn pleasure of feminist thought.--Karen Redrobe, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Maggie Hennefeld is assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available