Kirjahaku

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women’s humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest.This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy.Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women’s humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest.This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy.Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual is the first book to fully examine Mary McCarthy as a fiction writer and a cultural critic. With her sharp wit and critical eye, McCarthy offers a valuable perspective on the continuing debate over liberal values and the responsibility of the intellectual. As a Catholic woman from the Northwest, McCarthy stands on the periphery of the largely Jewish, male-dominated New York intellectual scene. This marginalized identity shapes her satiric vision of postwar American culture and makes her a consummate critic of liberalism from within. Drawing on unpublished materials from the Mary McCarthy archives, Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of one of America's leading women intellectuals.