British Women's Comic Fiction, 1890-1990

This work focuses upon women who have not merely produced comic texts, but used their comedies to examine laughter itself as a problematic issue. Whether to embrace laughter wholeheartedly, whether to do so in a cautious and limited manner, or whether to forswear it entirely - women's opinions and, indeed, feminists' opinions have seldom been in accord on one answer. For women writers of the 20th century, a century of activism, laughter has been something to be weighed carefully in terms of its ethical, political and pragmatic relationship to feminist values, as well as its ability or inability to help women survive.