Description
Book SynopsisLooks at female comic secondary characters who, though never on center stage, play an indispensable role in enriching and complicating the course of the narrative. This title explores what is queer about the middle - in the sense of eccentric and in terms of desire - and how that queerness functions as a part of and an antidote to narrative.
Trade Review"Explores female secondary characters as modern versions of the Shakespearean fool and shows how they are able to transgress social and sexual boundaries and speak the truth without punishment; examples include such comic actresses as Eve Arden, Whoopi Goldberg, and Thelma Ritter." -- The Chronicle of Higher Education "A useful contribution to scholarship. Roof explores the role in cinema of female 'comic seconds'. Through their gender, subsidiary status, independence, and queerness -- both eccentricity and implied homosexuality -- they traverse conventional boundaries, impeding or diverting standard fictional closure and thus acting subversively to disrupt pat ideology, even while locked in the constraints of narrative... Literate and thoughful." -- Choice ADVANCE PRAISE "Employing the verbal wit of a classic sidekick, All about Thelma and Eve clearly and often brilliantly pursues an innovative thesis through detailed and convincing analyses of both well-known and neglected films and performers." - Corey Creekmur, associate professor of English and film studies, University of Iowa
