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OverviewEver since Timon of Athens shunned his fellow-countrymen and went to live out in the wilderness, the misanthrope has proved to be a fascinating but troubling figure for writers and thinkers. This comparative study brings together a range of material from various genres, periods, and countries to explore the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and intellectual imagination from the late Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism. During this period, the term 'misanthropy' shifts from being an obscure Greek calque to being almost banal in its ubiquity. In order to trace the contours of the period's evolving attitudes towards misanthropy, this study takes a combined thematic and historical approach. After two chapters offering close readings of the period's key icons of misanthropy--Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Molière's Alceste--the remaining six chapters each explore different thematic issues of misanthropy as they surface across the period. Drawing on works by Shakespeare, Molière, Hobbes, Pascal, Rochester, Swift, Rousseau, Kotzebue, Schiller, Wollstonecraft, and Leopardi, as well as countless less canonical writers, this study demonstrates that the misanthrope is not a fixed, stable figure in early modern literature. Rather, he--or very occasionally she--emerges in many guises, from philosopher to comic grouch, from tragic hero to moral censor, from cynical villain to disappointed idealist, from quasi-bestial outsider to worldly satirist. As both critic of humanity and object of critical scrutiny, the misanthrope challenges straightforward oppositions between individual and society, virtue and vice, reason and folly, human and animal. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Joseph Harris (Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature, Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London)Publisher: Oxford University Press Imprint: Oxford University Press Dimensions: Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.40cm , Length: 24.00cm Weight: 0.608kg ISBN: 9780192867575ISBN 10: 0192867571 Pages: 304 Publication Date: 24 November 2022 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Misanthropic Origins: Timon of Athens 2: Misanthropy For a Polite Age? Molière's Le Misanthrope 3: Risible Animals: Misanthropic Satire 4: Self-love and Other-hatred (Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, Leopardi) 5: Alceste's Afterlives: Le Misanthrope after Molière 6: Philanthropic Misanthropy 7: Cures, Conversions, and Corrections 8: Malicious MisanthropyReviewsThis is a remarkable book. It is an admirable combination of critical acumen, wide-ranging erudition, intellectual range, and historical sense. * French Studies * Author InformationJoseph Harris studied French and German at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he later wrote his PhD thesis on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. After teaching in Cambridge, he started as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has worked ever since. He has written two books and numerous articles on such topics as gender, onstage laughter, dramatic spectatorship, death and violence, and misanthropy, and edited various collective words on religion and seventeenth-century theatre, identification, imagined afterlives, and Racine's tragedy Andromaque. He is co-editor of the journal French Studies. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |