18th century
1900s
A01=Simon Dickie
academic
Author_Simon Dickie
britain
british
cartoon
Category=DSBD
college
comedy
comic
culture
english major
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
farce
historical
history
humor
inappropriate
jest
lampoon
laughing
laughter
literary analysis
literature
manners
middle class
morals
pc
plays
polite
politically correct
research
satire
scholarly
sentimental
social studies
stereotypes
textbook
theatre
uk
united kingdom
university
unsentimental
variety show
Product details
- ISBN 9780226146188
- Weight: 737g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental - the product of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie overturns these notions in "Cruelty and Laughter", a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the era. Beneath the veneer of civilization, Dickie uncovers a rich strain of cruelty coursing through the period that reminds us just how slowly ordinary sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Dickie delves into an enormous archive of jestbooks, comic periodicals, farces, variety shows, and minor comic novels that amount to a bottomless repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. He also discovers epigrams about scurvy and one-act farces about hunchbacks in love and reveals that all of these exposed the limits of compassion of the period. Everyone - rich and poor, women as well as men - laughed along. In the process, he expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen.
"Cruelty and Laughter" is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
Simon Dickie is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
