Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction

Joseph L. Coulombe is a professor of American literature in the Department of English, Rowan University, New Jersey, United States. He is the author of two additional books, Reading Native American Literature (Routledge, 2011) and Mark Twain and the American West (U of Missouri Press, 2003), and multiple articles on various American writers, texts, and genres. His scholarship explores how literary narratives position readers in relation to shifting ideologies of gender, region, and race. Professor Coulombe earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1989. He originally hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town.

• Introduction – Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction: Critical Intersections, Methodologies, and GoalsChapter 1 – When Humor Bombs: Masculinity in Crisis in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s CourtChapter 2 – Weaponized Humor and Homosocial Bonding in Owen Wister’s The VirginianChapter 3 – Performing Humor in Dorothy Parker’s Fiction: Female Masculinity and Reader EngagementChapter 4 – Humor, Gender, and Community in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching GodChapter 5 – Subversive Humor in an Absurdly Gendered World: Joseph Heller’s Search for Meaning in Catch-22Chapter 6 – “Anything for a Laugh”: Transgressive Humor and Liberated Masculinity in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s ComplaintChapter 7 – The Efficacy of Humor in Sherman Alexie’s Flight: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Post-9/11 WorldWorks CitedIndex