Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgements vi
4. Introduction: Fictions of Comfort 1
5. Chapter 1. The Classical Regime of Literary Comfort: From Homer to Aristotle 23
6. Chapter 2. The Christian Regime of Literary Comfort: From Boethius to Dante 62
7. Chapter 3. Towards a Modern Regime of Literary Comfort: Shakespeare and the Failure to Console 110
8. Chapter 4. The Religion of Despair: George Sand and Gustave Flaubert on Reading and Writing 193
9. Chapter 5. Novels of Comfort: Woolf, Winnicott and the Work of Consolation 225
10. Chapter 6. Fragments of a Consolatory Discourse: Sontag, Riley, Proust, Barthes 256
11. Epilogue: The Library of Comfort 282
12. Bibliography 287
13. Index 304