Cruelty and Laughter

Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century

Häftad, Engelska, 2014

AvSimon Dickie

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A wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of eighteenth-century Britain, Cruelty and Laughter uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, Simon Dickie finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, rape, and wife-beating alongside epigrams about syphilis and one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. In the process, he expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Jane Austen, and Henry Fielding. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2014-04-14
Mått16 x 23 x 2 mm
Vikt567 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor382
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226142548

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"Placing Fielding, the greatest humourist of his time, back amongst his contemporaries and responding to the comedy of his writing as his first readers would have done is a masterly stroke in this scholarly, original and highly readable book." (Literary Review) "A brilliant and beautifully written book, Cruelty and Laughter introduces its readers to a world of violent mayhem, both rhetorical and real.... Such is the transformative experience of reading this book that I, for one, will never look at the mid-eighteenth century again in quite the same way." (H-Net Reviews) "Dickie mounts a compelling case against what he calls 'the politeness-sensibility paradigm,' by resurrecting a jeering counter-discourse that reveled in human suffering and physical affliction." (London Review of Books)"