Rather than analyzing women's humor in isolation, "Look Who's Laughing" maps the terrain that the genders share and the areas that each holds exclusively. The book's twenty essays investigate witty heroines, sexual parodies, domestic humor, and romantic comedies, as well as erotic language, sexual jokes, and humor-charged expressions of power. With its emphasis on the roles that gender plays in the creation, reception, and interpretation of comic art, "Look Who's Laughing" looks critically at generic and gender diversity as well as comedy's underlying unities.

New essays providing an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in social and political context. This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effectsof major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of the principal movements ofthe time (Junges Deutschland, Vormarz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America andEurope: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is Associate Professor of German at the same institution.

"Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural," edited by Gail Finney, presents a diverse and colorful spectrum of supernatural phenomena-- automatons, ghosts, talking animals, detached body parts with a life of their own, magical transformations, animated objects, mad scientists, and angels-- offering a vivid display of the endless powers of the imagination. Although fantasy and the supernatural have been present in literature since its beginnings, in the West these themes are especially prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries. This collection provides a comprehensive treatment of the fantastic mode during its heyday, ranging from the tales of the early 19th-century writer E.T.A. Hoffmann to the stories of the late 20th-century writer Gabriel Garci a Marquez. The volume is comparative in nature, including authors from Germany, the United States, England, France, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia. The selections in this anthology are presented in their entirety rather than in excerpt. This feature, together with the chronological organization of the volume, allows undergraduate students to readily understand the ways in which the representation of fantasy and the supernatural has developed over time.
Gail Finney (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century European literature. Previously she taught at Harvard University. The literature of fantasy and the supernatural provides a welcome antidote to her current work on family trauma in contemporary American film. Her books include "The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century, Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy" (ed.), "Christa Wolf," and "Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle" (ed.) In 2007 she received a Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award.

If the 21st century is the digital age, the 20th century can be characterized as the visual age the era in which visual activity achieved unprecedented prominence. As this volume richly demonstrates, the visual mode was nowhere more dynamic and powerful during the 1900s than in Germany.

Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany explores a wide spectrum of visual media in 20th-century Germany in their critical and social contexts. Contributors examine film, photography, cabaret performance, advertising, architecture, painting, dance, television, and cartography, investigating the ways in which these visual media were inflected by aesthetic innovation, changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality, and the political upheavals of the day. This volume sheds new light on German cultural history during the 1900s and represents a major contribution to the field of visual culture studies."