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This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment. Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with ...
Al-Jahiz (776-869) was one of the greatest exponents of Arabic prose of all time. His scholarship, the breadth of his interests, and his ability to express his ideas and arguments with vigour and humour were outstanding; "The Book of Misers" is his comical masterpiece, and one of the earliest works of fiction from the Islamic world. Generosity is regarded by Arab society as one of the principle virtues, and this satire on miserliness has a clear social purpose. With his acute powers of observation, light-hearted scepticism, his comic sense and satirical turn of mind, he ridicules both individuals and groups such as schoolmasters, singers or scribes. In addition, there is much incidental deta...
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Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"--caricatures o...