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'). David Punter here engages with awealth of theoretical ideas to explore the literature of pity, including Freud, Derrida, Levinas and others. His chapters cover Distinguishing Pity, 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 andGeorge 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. | The Literature of Pity by David Punter, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters