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.

Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

Rosenshield’s analyses are painstaking and insightful. . . . As an introduction to a topic that has for millennia remained of central importance and bewilderment for the human consciousness it is a welcome addition to the study of world literature.

The Russian Review

Gary Rosenshield’s scholarly masterpiece dives into uncharted territory to explore physical pain in classical Greek plays and nineteenth-century Russian novels. Enlightened readers will come to grasp the ligatures between ostensibly disparate worlds—that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—and emerge with an epiphany about justice and injustice. But those more courageous will venture forth to traverse that timeless Rosenshield path to broach the questions of today about the legitimacy and justice of any society that uses physical pain as a means of gaining political and moral authority.

Amy D. Ronner, St. Thomas University

This study fiercely tackles big questions about pain and justice through the bifocal lens of the tragedies of Aescyhlus and Sophocles and the work of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. By linking depictions of pain to indignation or horror at injustice, Gary Rosenshield discovers a previously unexplored supra-narrative where the multiplicity of possible relationships among victims, perpetrators, and witnesses occupies center stage and transcends differences of time, culture, and ideology.

Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University

Gary Rosenshield has provided a significant new contribution to his already long record of outstanding scholarship. In Physical Pain and Justice: Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel, he analyzes six foundational works by four different writers as representations of physical pain and suffering and finds unexpected thematic correlations among them. In particular, his conclusions provide innovative and stimulating insights into the political, historical, and social concerns of the writers and the times in which they lived. This important book will, of course, be of great interest to scholars concerned with the writers and works discussed. At the same time, the author’s direct and accessible style and his concern with the universal experience of physical pain and its implications will attract a more general audience as well.

Gary R. Jahn, University of Minnesota