Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

Still haunted, thirty years later, by memories of Jane, Claire and Angela, the bullies of her school years, imprisoned by the selfish demands of her invalid mother, betrayed by her boyfriend, Rose's only solace is the attic where she paints and invents an alter ego. When she's invited to a school reunion, Rose goes in disguise but flees when she's recognised by Maggie, her old Sports Mistress. Jane Rossetti, one of the trio who made Rose's school years a misery, now feeling remorse, is drawn into Rose's life through her abusive mother. Jane's ex-partner, Robyn, finds Rose "odd". Claire dies. Angela is murdered and Robyn warns Jane "she's a nutter...and you're the only one left". As Jane and Rose grow closer, Jane, ignores Robyn's warning until her daughter Lauren, disappears with Rose. Rose again feels rejection; more secrets emerge, and a terrified Lauren flees for her life.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Superstition sails into King's Harbour with tales of winged monsters rising from the dead. Midwife Maggie and husband Ian Pierce fight for reason and logic when a friend's nephew disappears from the grave, and the friend's behavior becomes more animal than man. As forces and bizarre events around the two lovers threaten their happiness, Maggie faces challenges from her expectant mothers and struggles to understand Ian's troubling behavior. Ian endeavors to cure his mind's affliction but fears the slide into insanity may be fatal. As terror and suspicion grow, will Maggie and Ian have to make the ultimate sacrifice to keep their love-and each other-alive?