Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Leland Poague (Iowa State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2003

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Essay Collection

Resources

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) was the last of Susan Sontag’s books to be published in her lifetime. In the book lists (“Also by Susan Sontag”) found in the front matter of her posthumous publications Regarding appears among her “Essays”. Sontag would likely have agreed with this classification; she herself draws attention to its status as a follow-on to On Photography (1977). That said, the form of Regarding the Pain of Others is less akin to that of her portmanteau collections, Against Interpretation (1966) or Styles of Radical Will (1969), say, than it is to Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (1989), b…

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6693 words

Citation: Poague, Leland. "Regarding the Pain of Others". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 November 2021 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13128, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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