Louisa May Alcott

Susan Straight

Regina Barreca

Little Women

Niccolò Machiavelli

Christian Gauss

The Prince

A selection of women's humor including quotations by Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Fran Lebowitz, Molly Ivens, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The Penguin Book of Women's Humor

Gene Weingarten

Two of the country's most original humor writers confront myths and stereotypes to establish once and for all that women are funnier than men--and vice versa. Illustrations.

One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up

I'm with Stupid

Nicole Hollander

The indefatigable humorist Regina Barreca is at it again. She and syndicated columnist Nicole Hollander (of Sylvia fame) have teamed up to create a book for and about women and their vices. Half text, half cartoons, An ABC of Vice offers a quick fix to any woman who needs a laugh, who needs permission to take her pleasures seriously while taking the rest of the world for a ride. This easy-to-access manual of mischievousness includes some hilarious ‘bad girl coupons" empowering the reader to indulge herself.

An Insatiable Women's Guide, Alphabetized

The ABC of Vice

First published in 1988, the 19 original essays (and three "Sylvia" cartoons) included in this volume deal with the gender-specific nature of comedy. This pioneering collection observes the creation of women’s comedy from a wide range of standpoints: political, sociological, psychoanalytical, linguistic, and historical. The writers explore the role of women’s comedy in familiar and unfamiliar territory, from Austen to Weldon, from Behn to Wasserstein. The questions they raise will lead to a redefinition of the genre itself.

Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Last Laughs

Bottoms up! This landmark celebration of women and drink chips away at traditional images of gender, one ice-cube at a time.

Why Women Like Us Like to Drink*

Make Mine a Double

Lee A. Jacobus

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Critical Impressions

Hélène Cixous

Exploring the dynamics of revenge and how acts of vengeance have affected various cultures, a humorous guide describes how revenge can be used for a positive end for a wide range of slights. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

The Wicked Delights of Getting Even

Sweet Revenge

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature is a landmark collection of 13 previously unpublished essays on nineteenth-century British poetry, fiction and prose by the most important English and American scholars in the field. The volume observes the subject from an unusually wide variety of viewpoints, including historical, sociological, psychoanalytic, feminist and mythological. There are works central and peripheral to the traditional Victorian canon discussed in Sex and Death; as such the essays present an unprecedented perspective on the shifts and movements of nineteenth-century literature. By grouping the essays under the aegis of sexuality and morality, the volume allows the authors to explore the most important aspects of the works they discuss.

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature

A popular columnist comments on life from an often humorous perspective.

Too Much of a Good Thing is Wonderful

In Untamed and Unabashed, Regina Barreca, noted authority on women and humor, examines the use of humor in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. She analyzes the ways that each writer uses comedic devices, especially those involving language itself, and discusses the gendered basis of their humor, providing a provocative feminist perspective on gender and comedy. Each of the essays argues that conservative critics have misread and misunderstood the importance of humor in the works of these women authors, and that women's humor serves to explode conventions oppressive to women and to offer women readers a critique of, and an alternative perspective on, the dominant cultural ideologies that contain and oppress them. The book concludes that these authors strategically deployed humor, coded in forms that women readers-but not men readers-would recognize and understand, as a means of educating and empowering those women readers. Barreca asserts that much of women's comic play has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation, allowing women to gain perspective by ridiculing the implicit insanities of a patriarchal culture. Using detailed persuasive new readings of various works of each of her chosen authors, she shows how the straightjacket of conventional femininity is challenged, confronted, and finally, thrown off. This volume demonstrates that comedy can effectively channel anger and rebellion by first making them appear to be acceptable and temporary phenomena, and then by harnessing the released energies, rather than dispersing them. This kind of comedy, which is at the heart of Untamed and Unabashed, terrifies those who hold order dear. It should.

Regina Barreca

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