The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

Author:   James E. Caron
Publisher:   Springer International Publishing AG
Edition:   1st ed. 2024
ISBN:  

9783031412752


Pages:   217
Publication Date:   03 January 2024
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern


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Overview

The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern argues that Sara Parton and her literary alter ego, Fanny Fern, occupy a star-power position within the antebellum literary marketplace dominated by women authors of sentimental fiction, writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (in)famously called “the damn mob of scribbling women.” The Fanny Fern persona represents a nineteenth-century woman voicing the modern feminine within a laughter-provoking bourgeois carnival, a forerunner of Hélène Cixous’s laughing Medusa figure and her theory about écriture féminine. By advancing an innovative theory about an Anglo-American aesthetic, comic belles lettres, Caron explains the comic nuances of Parton’s persona, capable of both an amiable and a caustic satire. The book traces Parton’s burgeoning celebrity, analyzes her satires on cultural expectations of gendered behavior, and provides a close look at her variegated comic style. The book then makes two first-order conclusions: Parton not only offers a unique profile for antebellum women comic writers, but her Fanny Fern persona also anchors a potential genealogy of women comic writers and activists, down to the present day, who could fit Kate Clinton’s concept of fumerism, a feminist style of humor that fumes, that embraces the comic power of a Medusa satire.

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Author:   James E. Caron
Publisher:   Springer International Publishing AG
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
Edition:   1st ed. 2024
Weight:   0.432kg
ISBN:  

9783031412752


ISBN 10:   3031412753
Pages:   217
Publication Date:   03 January 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women.- 2 Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern.- 3. The Satirist and Her Public.- 4 Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject.- 5 Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence.- 6 Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist.- 7 Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition.

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Author Information

James E. Caron is Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaiʽi at Mānoa. In addition to publishing many articles on comic writers and comic artifacts, he has authored Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement (2021), and Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008), as well as co-edited essays on Charlie Chaplin in Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (2013).

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