Laughing Feminism focuses on comedy in the works of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, authors who scrutinized the subjected prejudices against women in order to expose their absurdity and encourage readers to laugh at the folly of sexist views. Audrey Bilger shows that these women writers employed a full arsenal of comic weapons such as satire, burlesque, and parody to combat patriarchal nonsense and make comedy out of the discrepancies between the myth and reality of womanhood. Bilger draws (...) on current feminist criticism, comic theory, and the methodologies of literary history to provide a context for re-assessing the novels of these writers. At a time when overt feminist statements could ruin a woman's reputation, comedy enabled these authors to smuggle feminism into their writing. (shrink)

Adam Smith's lectures present a bleak theory of history in which the innate human results in the perpetuation of increasingly repressive slave societies. This theory challenges common conceptions about the philosophical and historical foundations of Smith's thought, and accounting for it requires moving beyond traditional dichotomies between an sphere grounded on asocial wants and a sphere grounded on sociability. For Smith, under the influence of earlier thinkers like La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, and Rousseau, all human behavior is rooted in our esteem-seeking (...) social nature, and the dominant form of esteem-seeking is a one based on external superiority. Understanding these foundations explains why Smith views both European commercial society and its central motive of economic self-interest as historically contingent, the product of a long series of unintended historical consequences. (shrink)