This collection is the first to focus on the transgressive and transformative power of American female humorists. It explores the work of authors and comediennes such as Carolyn Wells, Lucille Clifton, Mary McCarthy, Lynne Tillman, Constance Rourke, Roz Chast, Amy Schumer and Samantha Bee, and the ways in which their humor challenges gendered norms and assumptions through the use of irony, satire, parody, and wit. The chapters draw from the experiences of women from a variety of racial, class, and gender identities and encompass a variety of genres and comedic forms including poetry, fiction, prose, autobiography, graphic memoir, comedic performance, and new media. Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers will appeal to a general educated readership as well as to those interested in women's and gender studies, humor studies, urban studies, American literature and cultural studies, and media studies.

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Associate Professor of English in the School for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State College. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Literature of New York. She is currently working on a book, The Politics of Humor: New York Women of Wit, and is founder and chair of the Mary McCarthy Society.