Download or read book Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories written by Jeannie B. Thomas and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas combines these personal narratives with original scholarship drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to uncover meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.