Misanthropy in the Age of Reason - Hating Humanity From Shakespeare to Schiller

Bringing together a range of material from various genres, periods, and countries, this comparative study explores the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and intellectual imagination from the late Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 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 Misanthropy

About the author

Joseph 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.

Summary

Bringing together a range of material from various genres, periods, and countries, this comparative study explores the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and intellectual imagination from the late Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism.

Additional text

This is a remarkable book. It is an admirable combination of critical acumen, wide-ranging erudition, intellectual range, and historical sense.

Product details

• Authors: Joseph Harris, Joseph (Professor of Early Modern French a Harris, Harris Joseph
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 24.11.2022
• EAN: 9780192867575
• ISBN: 978-0-19-286757-5
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare, LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, Literary studies: general, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Shakespeare Studies & Criticism, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, Relating to Shakespeare / Shakespearean