Literature of Pity
Literature of Pity

Author: Punter David Punter

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0748691987

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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

Pity the Reader
Pity the Reader

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Rosetta Books

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0795352832

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“A rich, generous book about writing and reading and Kurt Vonnegut as writer, teacher, and friend . . . Every page brings pleasure and insight.”—Gail Godwin, New York Times bestselling author Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he’s given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition. His former student, Suzanne McConnell, has outfitted us for the journey, and in these 37 chapters covers the waterfront of how one American writer brought himself to the pinnacle of the writing art, and we can all benefit as a result. Kurt Vonnegut was one of the few grandmasters of American literature, whose novels continue to influence new generations about the ways in which our imaginations can help us to live. Few aspects of his contribution have not been plumbed—fourteen novels, collections of his speeches, his essays, his letters, his plays—so this fresh view of him is a bonanza for writers and readers and Vonnegut fans everywhere. “Part homage, part memoir, and a 100% guide to making art with words, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style is a simply mesmerizing book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!”—Andre Dubus III, #1 New York Times bestselling author “The blend of memory, fact, keen observation, spellbinding descriptiveness and zany characters that populated Vonnegut’s work is on full display here.”—James McBride, National Book Award-winning author

Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare
Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare

Author: Toria Johnson

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1843845741

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Exploring a wide range of material including dramatic works, medieval morality drama, and lyric poetry this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the history of emotions. Early modern English writing about pity evidences a social culture built specifically around emotion, one (at least partially) defined by worries about who deserves compassion and what it might cost an individual to offer it. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare positions early modern England as a place that sustains messy and contradictory views about pity all at once, bringing together attraction, fear, anxiety, positivity, and condemnation to paint a picture of an emotion that is simultaneously unstable and essential, dangerous and vital, deceptive and seductive. The impact of this emotional burden on individual subjects played a major role in early modern English identity formation, centrally shaping the ways in which people thought about themselves and their communities. Taking in a wide range of material - including dramatic works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley; medieval morality drama; and lyric poetry by Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Barnes, George Rodney and Frances Howard - this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the broader history of emotions, a field which has thus far remained largely the concern of social and cultural historians. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare shows that both literary materials and literary criticism can offer new insights into the experience and expression of emotional humanity.

Pity Transformed
Pity Transformed

Author: David Konstan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-03-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1472502310

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"Pity Transformed" is an examination of how pity was imagined and expressed in classical antiquity. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the pity of the Greeks and Romans differed from modern ideas. Among the topics investigated in this study are the appeal to pity in courts of law and the connection between pity and desert; the relation between pity and love or intimacy; self-pity; the role of pity in war and its relation to human rights and human dignity; divine pity from paganism to Christianity; and why pity was considered an emotion. This book will lead readers to ponder how the Greeks and Romans were both like and unlike us in this fundamental area of cultural sensibility.

Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice:Penguin Specials
Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice:Penguin Specials

Author: Nam Le

Publisher: Penguin Group Australia

Published: 2012-04-23

Total Pages: 30

ISBN-13: 1742535798

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A young Vietnamese-Australian named Nam, in his final year at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, is trying to find his voice on the page. When his father, a man with a painful past, comes to visit, Nam's writing and sense of self are both deeply changed. Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is a deeply moving story of identity, family and the wellsprings of creativity, from Nam Le's multi-award-winning collection The Boat. 'A tight and densely emotional journey that sucked me in and contained as much power as the lengthy title.' Killings, the Kill Your Darlings blog

Some Touch of Pity
Some Touch of Pity

Author: Rhoda Edwards

Publisher: Hutchinson Radius

Published: 1976-01-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780091255206

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Based on the life of Richard III, King of England.

Tragic Pathos
Tragic Pathos

Author: Dana LaCourse Munteanu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-11-10

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1139502344

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Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.

The Pity of Achilles
The Pity of Achilles

Author: Jinyo Kim

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780847686216

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In The Pity of Achilleus, Jinyo Kim examines how the major themes of the Iliad--Achilleus' 'wrath, ' heroic values such as honor and glory, and human mortality and suffering, to mention the most widely recognized--are connected to each other in a way that reveals the poem's structural coherence and unity. Kim asks whether Achilleus' pity toward Priam at the poem's close is, as is widely believed, a poetic deus ex machina. In other words, is the conception of Achilleus' pity an expression of a 'later' and 'more civilized' era, as a way of 'correcting' the warlike savagery that is an undeniable and significant part of the poem? She concludes, rather, that Achilleus' final reconciliation with the old king of Troy-- his 'enemy' according to the warrior ethos in the Iliad-- represents the integral and ultimate resolution of the theme of Achilleus' 'wrath' that is announced in the poem's opening lines. This book will be valuable for students and scholars of classical literature and classical civilization.

I Pity the Poor Immigrant
I Pity the Poor Immigrant

Author: Zachary Lazar

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0316254045

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This stunning novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey). In 1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig. In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.

Pity the Beast
Pity the Beast

Author: Robin McLean

Publisher:

Published: 2022-10-18

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9781913505523

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'Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity.' -- J M Coetzee Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American absurdity as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory, sideways into legend, and off into a lonesome future. Millennia ago, Ginny's family ranch was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it'll all be peacefully underwater. In the matter-of-fact here and now, though, it's a hotbed of lust and resentment, and about to turn ugly, because Ginny's just cheated on her husband Dan with the man who lives next door. Out on these prairies, word travels fast: everyone seems to know everyone's business. They know what Ginny did, and they know Ginny isn't sorry. She might not be proud of what she's done, but she doesn't regret it either. To be honest, she enjoyed the hell out of it, and as far as Ginny is concerned, that should be the end of the story. Problem is, no one else seems able to let it go. The community can't bear to let a woman like Ginny off the hook. Not with an attitude like hers. With detours through time, space, and myth, not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules, Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major new voice in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West, masculinity, good and evil, and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads, with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew--if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.