Joseph Harris studied French and German at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he later wrote his PhD thesis on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. After teaching in Cambridge, he started as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has worked ever since. He has written two books and numerous articles on such topics as gender, onstage laughter, dramatic spectatorship, death and violence, and misanthropy, and edited various collective words on religion and seventeenth-century theatre, identification, imagined afterlives, and Racine's tragedy Andromaque. He is co-editor of the journal French Studies.

This is a remarkable book. It is an admirable combination of critical acumen, wide-ranging erudition, intellectual range, and historical sense.

• Introduction 1: Misanthropic Origins: Timon of Athens 2: Misanthropy For a Polite Age? Molière's Le Misanthrope 3: Risible Animals: Misanthropic Satire 4: Self-love and Other-hatred (Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, Leopardi) 5: Alceste's Afterlives: Le Misanthrope after Molière 6: Philanthropic Misanthropy 7: Cures, Conversions, and Corrections 8: Malicious Misanthropy

Joseph Harris studied French and German at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he later wrote his PhD thesis on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. After teaching in Cambridge, he started as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has worked ever since. He has written two books and numerous articles on such topics as gender, onstage laughter, dramatic spectatorship, death and violence, and misanthropy, and edited various collective words on religion and seventeenth-century theatre, identification, imagined afterlives, and Racine's tragedy Andromaque. He is co-editor of the journal French Studies.

This is a remarkable book. It is an admirable combination of critical acumen, wide-ranging erudition, intellectual range, and historical sense.

• Introduction 1: Misanthropic Origins: Timon of Athens 2: Misanthropy For a Polite Age? Molière's Le Misanthrope 3: Risible Animals: Misanthropic Satire 4: Self-love and Other-hatred (Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, Leopardi) 5: Alceste's Afterlives: Le Misanthrope after Molière 6: Philanthropic Misanthropy 7: Cures, Conversions, and Corrections 8: Malicious Misanthropy

Joseph Harris studied French and German at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he later wrote his PhD thesis on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. After teaching in Cambridge, he started as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has worked ever since. He has written two books and numerous articles on such topics as gender, onstage laughter, dramatic spectatorship, death and violence, and misanthropy, and edited various collective words on religion and seventeenth-century theatre, identification, imagined afterlives, and Racine's tragedy Andromaque. He is co-editor of the journal French Studies.

This is a remarkable book. It is an admirable combination of critical acumen, wide-ranging erudition, intellectual range, and historical sense.

• Introduction 1: Misanthropic Origins: Timon of Athens 2: Misanthropy For a Polite Age? Molière's Le Misanthrope 3: Risible Animals: Misanthropic Satire 4: Self-love and Other-hatred (Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, Leopardi) 5: Alceste's Afterlives: Le Misanthrope after Molière 6: Philanthropic Misanthropy 7: Cures, Conversions, and Corrections 8: Malicious Misanthropy