Necessary madness

by Gregg Camfield

In this book, Gregg Camfield explores nineteenth-century American humor from the perspective of gender and domestic ideology, challenging recent theory asserting a broad gulf between men's and women's humor during the period and contributing vital new insights to the study of humor in general. Capturing in part I a vision of humor unique to the era, Camfield examines the period's faith in what was called "amiable humor," a genial and supple comic mode whose non-aggression makes it resist easy assimilation to theories stressing humor's basis in hostility, negation, rage, and other combative or displaced energies. Turning next to literary case studies powerfully revealing of this contact, Camfield in part II pairs male and female humorists - Washington Irving and Fanny Fern; Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville; Mark Twain and Marietta Holley; and George Washington Harris and Mary Wilkins Freeman - not only to demonstrate the way these influential writers approach domesticity with g