Freaks, Dwarfs and Boors
Thomas Keymer: 18th-Century Jokes, 2 August 2012
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental 18th Century
by Simon Dickie.
Chicago, 362 pp., £29, December 2011,978 0 226 14618 8 Show More
by Simon Dickie.
Chicago, 362 pp., £29, December 2011,
“... everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially to deformities. In Cruelty and Laughter, Simon Dickie mounts a compelling case against what he calls ‘the politeness-sensibility paradigm’, by resurrecting a jeering counter-discourse that revelled in human suffering and physical affliction. His point about the sentimental 18th century is partly a ... ”