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Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Barnes and Noble
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Current price: $99.00
Barnes and Noble
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Current price: $99.00
Size: Hardcover
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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 everyonerich and poor, women as well as menlaughed 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
, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter.
is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.