Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.
By:
Joseph L. Coulombe
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 476g
ISBN: 9781032752143
ISBN 10: 1032752149
Series: Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
Pages: 164
Publication Date: 08 November 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction – Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction: Critical Intersections, Methodologies, and Goals Chapter 1 – When Humor Bombs: Masculinity in Crisis in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Chapter 2 – Weaponized Humor and Homosocial Bonding in Owen Wister’s The Virginian Chapter 3 – Performing Humor in Dorothy Parker’s Fiction: Female Masculinity and Reader Engagement Chapter 4 – Humor, Gender, and Community in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Chapter 5 – Subversive Humor in an Absurdly Gendered World: Joseph Heller’s Search for Meaning in Catch-22 Chapter 6 – “Anything for a Laugh”: Transgressive Humor and Liberated Masculinity in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint Chapter 7 – The Efficacy of Humor in Sherman Alexie’s Flight: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Post-9/11 World Works Cited Index
Joseph L. Coulombe is a professor of American literature in the Department of English, Rowan University, New Jersey, United States. He is the author of two additional books, Reading Native American Literature (Routledge, 2011) and Mark Twain and the American West (U of Missouri Press, 2003), and multiple articles on various American writers, texts, and genres. His scholarship explores how literary narratives position readers in relation to shifting ideologies of gender, region, and race. Professor Coulombe earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1989. He originally hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town.
