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Pity in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture "Liberté, Egalité, Pitié"
Book Code: C8000
ISBN: 0-275-98000-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98000-9
328 pages, n/a
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 2/28/2004
List Price: $75.00 (UK Sterling Price: £41.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 X 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description: The scrutiny of pity as a cardinal altruistic attribute has emerged in the last two decades as a significant common denominator in disciplines ranging from philosophy to social psychology and comparative literature to gender studies. "Pity" is a term and concept of tremendous importance to a historian and interpreter of the humanities and social sciences. It is a prism through which to examine how given cultures attach value to nonrational components of social life and of human flourishing. Sánchez describes how an appeal to a reader's sense of traditional "pity" in the writings of French philosophers, pedagogues, social theorists, and novelists interacted, in the sociopolitical sphere of the fin-de-siécle, with the interest in studying and promoting this very virtue as a principle of social attachment. This study brings to light striking parallels from one fin-de-siécle to another, highlighting the extensive rhetorical and emotive investment of various French disciplines in both probing and promoting pity. In doing so, a number of French thinkers and writers, both major and subsequently ignored, forged a cognitive theory of sentiments that intriguingly presages contemporary theories. They also codified a discursively and rhetorically doctrinaire pity that was reflected in pedagogy, especially female education; political philosophy and psychology; literary criticism and fiction--in ways that are still instructive for us today.
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: Pity, Past and Present
  • Prologue: The French Pro-Pity Tradition
  • Pity at the Center of a Renascent Sentimentalism
  • "Affective Philosophy": Pity as Cognitive Sentiment
  • The "Altar" of Civilization
  • Between Social Psychology and Pedagogy
  • Patrimonial, Social, and Pedagogical Anxieties Around Pity
  • Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
  • The Solidarity Movement and the Dreyfus Affair
  • Engendering Pity
  • The Patrimony of Literary Pity in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction
  • Debating at the Goncourts' "Grenier"
  • Cosmopolitanism or Francité
  • From Germinie to Germinal
  • A Rhetoric of the Feminine: Paul Bourget, Octave Mirbeau, and Leon Bloy
  • Moving the Past: Marcel Proust and Pierre Loti
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
LC Card Number: 2003042066
LCC Class: BJ703
Dewey Class: 177
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