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A collection of newly composed essays, some with a historical focus and some with a contemporary focus, which addresses the problem of explaining the appeal of artworks whose appreciation entails negative or difficult emotions on the appreciator´s part - what has traditionally been known as "the paradox of tragedy".

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Introduction; Jerrold Levinson PART I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 1. Tragic Pleasures in Plato and Aristotle; Pierre Destrée 2. The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art in Enlightenment Aesthetics; Carole Talon-Hugon 3. A Lust of the Mind: Curiosity and Aversion in 18th Century British Aesthetics; Carolyn Korsmeyer 4. Mere Suffering: Hume and the Problem of Tragedy; Christopher Williams 5. The Problem and Promise of the Sublime: Lessons from Kant and Schopenhauer; Sandra Shapshay PART II: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES 6. A Simple Solution to the Paradox of Negative Emotion; Raf DeClercq 7. Painful Art and the Limits of Well-Being; Aaron Smuts 8. That Obscure Object of Desire: Pleasure in Painful Art; Jonathan Gilmore 9. Playing With Fire: Art and the Seductive Power of Pain; Iskra Fileva 10. Heavenly Hurt: The Joy and Value of Sad Poetry; Anna Christina Ribeiro 11. Negative Emotions and Creativity; Derek Matravers 12. Attention, Negative Valence, and Tragic Emotions; Cain Todd 13. Watching the Unwatchable: ´Irreversible´, ´Empire´, and the Other Paradox of Negative Emotions; David Davies

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David Davies, McGill University, Canada Pierre Destrée University Catholique de Louvain, Belgium Raf DeClercq, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Iskra Fileva, University of North Carolina, USA Jonathan Gilmore, Columbia University, USA Carolyn Korsmeyer, University of Buffalo, USA Derek Matravers, The Open University, UK Anna Christina Ribeiro, Texas Tech University, USA Sandra Shapshay, Indiana University, USA Aaron Smuts, Rhode Island College, USA Carole Talon-Hugon, University of Nice, France Cain Todd, University of Lancaster, UK Christopher Williams, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

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