Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)Making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

Front Matter....Pages i-ix
General Introduction....Pages 1-3
Front Matter....Pages 5-12
Laughing at Ourselves: Gendered Humor in Classical Greece....Pages 13-29
Is the Comic World a Paradise for Women? Medieval Models of Portable Utopia....Pages 31-45
Taking Women’s Work Seriously: Medieval Humor and the Gendering of Labor....Pages 47-63
Gender Subversion and the Early Christian East: Reconstructing the Byzantine Comic Mime....Pages 65-83
Gossips’ Mirth: Gender, Humor, and Female Spectators in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626)....Pages 85-102
The Magic of a Joke: Humor and Gender in Islamicate Ottoman Aesthetics....Pages 103-120
Front Matter....Pages 121-131
Laughter, Sex, and Violence: Constructing Gender in Early Modern English Jestbooks....Pages 133-149
Horny Priests and Their Parishioners....Pages 151-162
Humor, Women, and Male Anxieties in Ancient Greek Visual Culture....Pages 163-189
Hegemony and Humor: Class and Hegemonic Masculinities in Three Premodern Chinese Humorous Texts....Pages 191-209
Gender, Humor, and Power in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature....Pages 211-228
Laughing at the Unmanly Man in Early Modern Sweden....Pages 229-248
Back Matter....Pages 249-256