A01=Jessica Hines
aesthetics of suffering
Author_Jessica Hines
Category=DSBB
Category=NHDJ
Category=QDTQ
Christine de Pizan
compassion as a tool of tyranny
Dante Alighieri
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Geoffrey Chaucer and compassion
Giles of Rome
history of compassion
history of emotions
John Gower
medieval aesthetic theory
politicizing compassion
Richard II and political poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781501789199
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Forms of Suffering demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer transformed pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature by tracing his reformulations of trans-European pity discourses for an English audience. In these reformulations, Chaucer brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity's work in challenging, even overturning, traditional power structures such as social status, gender, and race. Critically, his consideration of pity also explores its precarity: the ways that pity could easily slide from transformative justice into a weapon of unjust oppression.
Jessica Hines describes how Chaucer's writing was formative in shaping an English pity discourse increasingly critical of the sociopolitical capacity of pity to act as a tool for challenging injustice and reforming oppressive social structures. Forms of Suffering makes clear the profound appeal of pity's ability to challenge structures of power in Chaucer's writing, as well as the ways that pity itself could be—and was being—manipulated by the powerful for their own ends.
Jessica Hines is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine.
