Awkward Appendages: Comic Umbrellas in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalVictorian Literature and Culture
Volume45
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)475-492
Number of pages18
ISSN1060-1503
Publication statusPublished - 30 Aug 2017

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Humanities - Umbrellas, print culture, periodicals, humour, comedy, Victorian, nineteenth century, comedy theory, Alenka Zupancic, democracy, Identity construction, material culture

ID: 160575082