In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

This book analyses Barbara Pym’s published and unpublished work through a new image, that of the troublesome woman. It details the political nature of her work, highlighting her feminist ideas which are hidden in village-like settings and revealed by troublesome women. By exploring Pym’s written work, published, and unpublished, diaries and notebooks, the book shows that this material gives credence to Hilary Pym’s interpretation of her sister as a complex person.

In this study of three of Barbara Pym's novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women's humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women's humour enables Pym's female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

Joinings and Disjoinings illustrates the importance of marriage or singleness in short stories and novels and suggests the diverse perspectives the topic can provide on specific works and on analysis of the cultural importance of marriage and marital status. Essays discuss canonical and lesser-known works, providing social, historical, and literary context.

This illustrated and fully updated Third Edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the most authoritative and international survey of world literature in English available. The Guide covers everything from Old English to contemporary writing from all over the English-speaking world. There are entries on writers from Britain and Ireland, the USA, Canada, India, Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Australia, as well as on many important poems, novels, literary journals and plays. This new edition has been brought completely up to date with more than 280 new author entries, most of them for living authors. The general reader will find it fascinating to browse and to discover many new writers and works, while students will find it an invaluable resource for daily use. This is a unique work of reference for the twenty-first century that no reader or library should be without.

Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression. Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.