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.
| ISBN: | 9783031412752 |
| Publication date: | 3rd January 2024 |
| Author: | James E Caron |
| Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan an imprint of Springer International Publishing AG |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 217 pages |
| Series: | Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Popular culture Comedy and stand-up |