The literature of pity

Product Description
Pity represents a combination of fear, helplessness and overwhelming agitation. It is a term which suffuses our everyday lives; it is also a dangerous term hovering between approval of sympathy and disapproval of emotional wallowing (as in 'self-pity'). This book traces an entire history of pity, as an emotion and as an element in the arts, engaging as it does so with a wealth of theoretical ideas including Freud, Derrida, Levinas and others. It begins with an 'Introduction: Distinguishing Pity', followed by chapters on the Aristotelian framework; Buddhism and pity; the pieta in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Shakespeare on pity; Milton's pitiless Christianity; pity and charity in the early novel; Blake's views on pity; the Victorian debate, from Austen to Dickens and George Eliot; Brecht and Chekhov on pity and self-pity; 'war, and the pity of war'; Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith; pity, immigration and the colony; and finally three contemporary texts by Michel Faber, Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy.Features* Original treatment of the concept of pity providing detailed textual criticism and speculative argument* Wide-ranging: running from ancient Greek theory to the present day* Covers a wide variety of texts, including fiction, poetry and drama* Engages with the most recent theoretical debates about literature and the emotions
From the Back Cover
Traces the meanings and inflections of the term ‘pity’ as it has run through Western culture to the present day Although 'pity' is a term we use all the time, it has not been dealt with in a transhistorical literary context before. Sharply distinguishable from such apparently similar terms as 'compassion' and 'sympathy', it is a peculiarly apposite term for contemporary investigation, living as we do in a world where pity is both widely required and simultaneously condemned as a kind of self-indulgence. Major writers addressed in the book include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Fielding, Blake, Austen, Chekhov, Brecht, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Primo Levi, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Derek Walcott and Bob Dylan. David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His most recent publications include Metaphor (2007); Modernity (2007); Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009); and A New Companion to the Gothic (ed., 2012). He has also published five volumes of poetry. Cover image: Pietà, Michelangelo, 1498–1499 Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com
About the Author
David Punter, having worked at universities in England, Scotland, Hong Kong and China, is now Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He has published over twenty monographs and edited collections in the Gothic, romantic writing, modern and contemporary writing, and literary theory. His most recent publications include Writing the Passions (2000); Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (2000); Metaphor (2007); Modernity (2007); Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009); and A New Companion to the Gothic (ed., 2012). He has also published five volumes of poetry.