Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion

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Lauren Berlant
Routledge, Mar 14, 2014 - Education - 256 pages

In Compassion, ten scholars draw on literature, psychoanalysis, and social history to provide an archive of cases and genealogies of compassion. Together these essays demonstrate how "being compassionate" is shaped by historical specificity and social training, and how the idea of compassion takes place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and even contradictory.

 

Contents

Introduction Compassion and Withholding
Chapter 1 Compassion
Chapter 2 Much of Madness and More of Sin Compassion for Ligeia
Chapter 3 Calculating Compassion
Chapter 4 Poor Hetty
Chapter 5 Moving Pictures George Eliot and Melodrama
Chapter 6 Provoking George Eliot
Chapter 7 Compassions Compulsion
Chapter 8 Cosmetic Surgeons of the Social Darwin Freud and Wells and the Limits of Sympathy on The Island of Dr Moreau
Chapter 9 Suffering and Thinking The Scandal of Tone in Eichmann in Jerusalem
Contributors
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About the author (2014)

Lauren Berlant is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Among her books are The Queen of America Goes to Washington City and The Anatomy of Fantasy.