Cruelty and Laughter
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€43.99
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 9780226142548
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 14 Apr 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Simon Dickie is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
