Awkward Appendages: Comic Umbrellas in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
Standard
Awkward Appendages: Comic Umbrellas in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture. / Damkjær, Maria.
I: Victorian Literature and Culture, Bind 45, Nr. 3, 30.08.2017, s. 475-492.Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Author
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
T1 - Awkward Appendages: Comic Umbrellas in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
AU - Damkjær, Maria
PY - 2017/8/30
Y1 - 2017/8/30
N2 - In nineteenth-century comic writing, the umbrella represents a troublesome material world: umbrellas were always threatening to break, flip inside out or to disappear and reappear in the most mysterious fashion. The umbrella was a trope for oddness, resistance and perversity of intent. With the help of Alenka Zupančič’s theory of comedy, this article argues that the umbrella in the cultural imagination marks an unreliable world of signs. Umbrellas, with their troublesome peripatetic nature, become arbiters of human destiny. Comic writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘The Philosophy of Umbrellas’ (1871), claim that umbrellas are repositories of democratic personhood. But since umbrellas are supremely alienable, their owners remain mere placeholders of identity. Umbrella comedy plays with the idea that modern personhood is contained in a near-arbitrary and perverse system of signs.
AB - In nineteenth-century comic writing, the umbrella represents a troublesome material world: umbrellas were always threatening to break, flip inside out or to disappear and reappear in the most mysterious fashion. The umbrella was a trope for oddness, resistance and perversity of intent. With the help of Alenka Zupančič’s theory of comedy, this article argues that the umbrella in the cultural imagination marks an unreliable world of signs. Umbrellas, with their troublesome peripatetic nature, become arbiters of human destiny. Comic writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘The Philosophy of Umbrellas’ (1871), claim that umbrellas are repositories of democratic personhood. But since umbrellas are supremely alienable, their owners remain mere placeholders of identity. Umbrella comedy plays with the idea that modern personhood is contained in a near-arbitrary and perverse system of signs.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - Umbrellas
KW - print culture
KW - periodicals
KW - humour
KW - comedy
KW - Victorian
KW - nineteenth century
KW - comedy theory
KW - Alenka Zupancic
KW - democracy
KW - Identity construction
KW - material culture
UR - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/awkward-appendages-comic-umbrellas-in-nineteenthcentury-print-culture/775AA6C68C592A992FE6E5D02583E6D0
M3 - Journal article
VL - 45
SP - 475
EP - 492
JO - Victorian Literature and Culture
JF - Victorian Literature and Culture
SN - 1060-1503
IS - 3
ER -
ID: 160575082