Cruelty and laughter : forgotten comic literature and the unsentimental Eighteenth Century /
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 Enlighte...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Chicago ; London :
University of Chicago Press,
2011.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | CONNECT |
Table of Contents:
- Introduction: The unsentimental Eighteenth Century, 1740-70
- Jestbooks and the indifference to reform
- Nasty jokes, polite women
- How to be a wit
- Cripples, hunchbacks, and the limits of sympathy
- Epigrams and literary freaks
- Dancing cripples
- Everyday laughter: evidence
- Damaged lives: experience
- Body determinism
- Delights of privilege
- Laughing at the lower orders
- Caveats from social history
- High jinks and violent freedoms
- Lovelace at the haberdasher
- Joseph Andrews and the great laughter debate
- Narrative from a high horse
- Fielding's anatomy of laughter
- The problem with parsons
- Adams and the enemies of fun
- Rape jokes and the law
- Laughter and disbelief
- Functions of an assault
- Accusations, remedies, and local justice
- Humors of the Old Bailey
- In conclusion: the forgotten best sellers of early English fiction
- Ramble novels and slum realism
- Reading for the filler
- Unsentimental readers and literary history.
