Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture

<p><i>Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction</i> offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, <i>Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction</i> offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of <i>Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction</i> is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.</p>