TY - BOOK AU - Caron,James E. ED - SpringerLink (Online service) TI - The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern T2 - Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, SN - 9783031412769 AV - PN760.5-769 PY - 2024/// CY - Cham PB - Springer International Publishing, Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan KW - Literature, Modern KW - 19th century KW - America KW - Literatures KW - Comedy KW - Nineteenth-Century Literature KW - North American Literature KW - Comedy Studies N1 - 1 Introduction: Fanny Fern and the Mob of Scribbling Women -- 2 Sara Payson Willis Parton’s (Comic) Preacher, Fanny Fern -- 3. The Satirist and Her Public -- 4 Satirizing Gender Expectations: Fanny Fern as the Impossible Subject -- 5 Creating Comic Community: Scathing Epithets, Caricature, and Comic Violence -- 6 Constructing Fanny Fern as Satirist -- 7 Fanny Fern’s Significance in the American Comic Tradition N2 - The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern argues that Sara Parton and her literary alter ego, Fanny Fern, occupy a star-power position within the antebellum literary marketplace dominated by women authors of sentimental fiction, writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (in)famously called “the damn mob of scribbling women.” The Fanny Fern persona represents a nineteenth-century woman voicing the modern feminine within a laughter-provoking bourgeois carnival, a forerunner of Hélène Cixous’s laughing Medusa figure and her theory about écriture féminine. By advancing an innovative theory about an Anglo-American aesthetic, comic belles lettres, Caron explains the comic nuances of Parton’s persona, capable of both an amiable and a caustic satire. The book traces Parton’s burgeoning celebrity, analyzes her satires on cultural expectations of gendered behavior, and provides a close look at her variegated comic style. The book then makes two first-order conclusions: Parton not only offers a unique profile for antebellum women comic writers, but her Fanny Fern persona also anchors a potential genealogy of women comic writers and activists, down to the present day, who could fit Kate Clinton’s concept of fumerism, a feminist style of humor that fumes, that embraces the comic power of a Medusa satire UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41276-9 ER -