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Cruelty and Laughter by Simon Dickie (Hardback)
£80.00
Out of stock
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9780226146188
Published:
02 Dec 2011
Format:
Hardback
Number of pages:
362 pages
Dimensions:
229x152x28mm
Weight:
0.653kgs
Author:
A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain, this text turns away from sentimental & polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals, variety shows & minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo & political correctness unimagined.
Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental-the creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor 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, Dickie finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. He shows us that everyone-rich and poor, women as well as men-laughed along. In the process, Dickie also expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. He devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
About the Author: Simon Dickie is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
| Number of pages | 362 |
|---|
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