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This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a "cold eye" was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere "school of the unsentimental" offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.
Toughness (Personality trait) --- Aesthetics --- Suffering in literature. --- Suffering in art. --- Psychological aspects. --- Weil, Simone, --- Arendt, Hannah, --- Sontag, Susan, --- MacCarthy, Mary, --- Arbus, Diane, --- Didion, Joan. --- Diane Arbus. --- Hannah Arendt. --- Joan Didion. --- Mary McCarthy. --- Simone Weil. --- Susan Sontag. --- aesthetics. --- emotion. --- style. --- unsentimental.
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Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental-the 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 wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. He shows us that everyone-rich and poor, women as well as men-laughed 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 Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
English wit and humor --- Cruelty in literature. --- British wit and humor --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- comic, humor, laughter, laughing, comedy, literature, sentimental, unsentimental, literary analysis, 18th century, 1900s, history, historical, academic, scholarly, research, english major, college, university, textbook, british, culture, britain, uk, united kingdom, social studies, stereotypes, middle class, morals, manners, polite, enlightenment, lampoon, jest, farce, satire, variety show, cartoon, politically correct, pc, inappropriate, plays, theatre.
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