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The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern
Author
Title
The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern [electronic resource] / by James E. Caron.
ISBN
9783031412769
Edition
1st ed. 2024.
Publication
Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Physical Description
1 online resource (XIII, 217 p.) 1 illus.
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
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Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
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.
Variant and related titles
Springer ENIN.
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Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
January 17, 2024
Series
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture,
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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