Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture

Women have been tricking men for thousands of years, and female tricksters have been appearing in classic and popular texts at least since the Thousand and One Nights. While there are many studies of tricksters, few have focused on the chicanery of women, and none have dealt with the ways in which the female trickster is constructed in America.

Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women is the first book to explore the cultural work performed by female tricksters in the new country of American mass consumer culture. Beginning with such nineteenth-century novels as Capitola the Madcap and moving through twentieth-century novels, films, radio, and television shows, Lori Landay looks at how popular heroines use craft and deceit to circumvent the limitations of femininity. She considers texts of the 1920s such as Elinor Glyn's It and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; films of Mae West, as well as other Depression-era and wartime film comedy; the postwar television series I Love Lucy; and such contemporary texts as Roseanne, Ellen, and Batman. In addition, Landay explores the connections between these texts and advertisements selling products that encourage female deception and trickery.

Author: Lori Landay
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 02/01/1998
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780812216516

About the Author
Lori Landay teaches in the Department of English and Journalism at Western Illinois University.