Cruelty and Laughter Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century

Name: Cruelty and Laughter Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Price: 23.75 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780226146188

ISBN-10: 0226146189

ISBN-13: 9780226146188

Edition: 2011

Authors: Simon Dickie

List price: $99.00

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Description:

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental-the product of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie contests these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the veneer of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich strain of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of jestbooks, comic periodicals, farces, variety shows, and minor comic novels, Dickie discovers a bottomless repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. He also finds epigrams about scurvy…

Book details

List price: $99.00
Copyright year: 2011
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 12/1/2011
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Size: 0.66" wide x 0.93" long x 0.10" tall
Weight: 1.430
Language: English

Simon Dickie is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.



List of Illustrations


Preface


Acknowledgments


Introduction: The Unsentimental Eighteenth Century, 1740-70



Jestbooks and the Indifference to Reform


Nasty Jokes, Polite Women


How to Be a Wag



Cripples, Hunchbacks, and the Limits of Sympathy


Deformity Genres


Dancing Cripples and the London Stage


Streets and Coffeehouses


Poetry and Polite Letters


Damaged Lives


Disabled Bodies and the Inevitability of Laughter



Delights of Privilege


Laughing at the Lower Orders


Contexts from Social History


Frolics, High Jinks, and Violent Freedoms


Lovelace at the Haberdasher



Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate


Narrative from a High Horse


The Ethics of Ridicule


Fielding's Problem with Parsons



Rape Jokes and the Law


Laughter and Disbelief


Modesty and the Impossibility of Consent


Functions of an Assault


Accusing, Making Up, and the Local Magistrate


Humors of the Old Bailey


In Conclusion: The Forgotten Best-Sellers of Early English Fiction


Ramble Novels and Slum Comedy


Reading for the Filler


Abbreviation


Notes


Index