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Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century,Used
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Eighteenthcentury British culture is often seen as polite and sentimentalthe creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor 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, Dickie finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wifebeating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside oneact 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 centurys major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. He devotes particular attention to Henry Fieldings Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, farreaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenthcentury Britain.
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