BackDeath by Laughter
Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (book in English)
- Type
- Studies
- Subject
- Silent Cinema
- comic, burlesque, woman, silent cinema
- Publishing Date
- 2024 (March 19, 2024)
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Collection
- (no collection)
- Language
- English
Relative size
- Physical desc.
- Paperback • 368 pages • 34 €
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm) - ISBN
- 978-0-231-21329-5
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Book Presentation:
Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate--or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women's risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?
Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of "hysterical laughter," exploring how women's amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.
Hennefeld traces the social politics of women's laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen's cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes (2018)
by Maggie Hennefeld
(in English)
Subject: History of Cinema
> On a related topic:
Harold Lloyd (2009)
Magic in a Pair of Horn-Rimmed Glasses
by Annette D'Agostino Lloyd
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Les Archives Charlie Chaplin (2021)
by Paul Duncan
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Comic Venus (2017)
Women and Comedy in American Silent Film
by Kristen Anderson Wagner
(in English)
Subject: Silent Cinema
Parole muette, récit burlesque (2015)
Les expressions silencieuses aux XIXe-XXe siècles
by Henri Garric
Subject: Silent Cinema
Women in Silent Cinema (2017)
Histories of Fame and Fate
by Annette Förster
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Pink-Slipped (2018)
What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?
by Jane M. Gaines
(in English)
Subject: History of Cinema
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