Gary Rosenshield is professor emeritus of Slavic languages and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hurting broken bodies might be the global norm, but this fascinating book claims that pain—not routine moral or mental suffering, but the body in chronic excruciating physical pain—has been understudied for what it can tell us about just and unjust world orders. Three great brutal Greek tragedies are juxtaposed to three classic sites of pain in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The ancients in their theodicy are shown to be surprisingly open to the risk of sympathy, both by humans and immortals; the Russian novelists, in their sociopolitical musings, surprisingly cold-blooded about clemency. This is affect or emotion studies at its best. Rooted in real bodies kept alive in literary masterpieces, pain is linked with witnessing, compassion, outrage, and the survival of the state, all of which inevitably leads out of itself into cosmic questions of injustice and potentials for its transcendence.

• Chapter 1: Prometheus Bound: Punishment, Power, and JusticeChapter 2: Sophocles' The Women of Trachis: Physical Pain, the Hero, and the GodsChapter 3: Sophocles' Philoctetes: Pain, Outrage, and JusticeChapter 4: Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead: Corporal Punishment, Justice and the StateChapter 5: Pain, Truth, and History (Injustice) in War and PeaceChapter 6: Pain, Truth, and Justice: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Gary Rosenshield is professor emeritus of Slavic languages and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hurting broken bodies might be the global norm, but this fascinating book claims that pain—not routine moral or mental suffering, but the body in chronic excruciating physical pain—has been understudied for what it can tell us about just and unjust world orders. Three great brutal Greek tragedies are juxtaposed to three classic sites of pain in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The ancients in their theodicy are shown to be surprisingly open to the risk of sympathy, both by humans and immortals; the Russian novelists, in their sociopolitical musings, surprisingly cold-blooded about clemency. This is affect or emotion studies at its best. Rooted in real bodies kept alive in literary masterpieces, pain is linked with witnessing, compassion, outrage, and the survival of the state, all of which inevitably leads out of itself into cosmic questions of injustice and potentials for its transcendence.

• Chapter 1: Prometheus Bound: Punishment, Power, and JusticeChapter 2: Sophocles' The Women of Trachis: Physical Pain, the Hero, and the GodsChapter 3: Sophocles' Philoctetes: Pain, Outrage, and JusticeChapter 4: Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead: Corporal Punishment, Justice and the StateChapter 5: Pain, Truth, and History (Injustice) in War and PeaceChapter 6: Pain, Truth, and Justice: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Gary Rosenshield is professor emeritus of Slavic languages and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hurting broken bodies might be the global norm, but this fascinating book claims that pain—not routine moral or mental suffering, but the body in chronic excruciating physical pain—has been understudied for what it can tell us about just and unjust world orders. Three great brutal Greek tragedies are juxtaposed to three classic sites of pain in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The ancients in their theodicy are shown to be surprisingly open to the risk of sympathy, both by humans and immortals; the Russian novelists, in their sociopolitical musings, surprisingly cold-blooded about clemency. This is affect or emotion studies at its best. Rooted in real bodies kept alive in literary masterpieces, pain is linked with witnessing, compassion, outrage, and the survival of the state, all of which inevitably leads out of itself into cosmic questions of injustice and potentials for its transcendence.

• Chapter 1: Prometheus Bound: Punishment, Power, and JusticeChapter 2: Sophocles' The Women of Trachis: Physical Pain, the Hero, and the GodsChapter 3: Sophocles' Philoctetes: Pain, Outrage, and JusticeChapter 4: Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead: Corporal Punishment, Justice and the StateChapter 5: Pain, Truth, and History (Injustice) in War and PeaceChapter 6: Pain, Truth, and Justice: The Death of Ivan Ilyich