Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction: Intersections, Performances, and Functions

Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much needed attention to the complex ways that humor can both support and subvert masculine codes and behaviors in American literature, culture, and thought.

Joseph L. Coulombe is a Professor of American literature in the English Department at Rowan University in New Jersey, U.S. He is the author of two additional books, Reading Native American Literature (Routledge, 2011) and Mark Twain and the American West (2003), as well as 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 in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1989. He originally hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town.