Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current
international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of
women's comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy
theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the
agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently
have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize
women's contributions to-and political uses of-comedy. The essays
collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender
and comedy, spanning centuries of literature and a diversity of
methodologies. Through a reconsideration of literary, theatrical, and
mass media texts from the Classical period to the present, Women and
Comedy: History, Theory, Practice responds to the historical
marginalization and/or trivialization of both women and comedy. The
essays collected in this volume assert the importance of recognizing the
role of women and comedy in order to understand these texts, their
historical contexts, and their possibilities and limits as models for
social engagement. In the spirit of comedy itself, these analyses allow
for opportunities to challenge and reevaluate the theoretical approaches
themselves.
