Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears

'Crying' looks at the way people have understood weeping from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through tears found in today's films, advertisements, and therapies. Philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, William James, and Sartre have attempted to explain tears, as have physiologists from Hippocrates through Darwin and contemporary neurophysiologists and ophthalmologists. In addition to consolidating these theories, Tom Lutz also examines paintings from medieval times through Picasso, literary texts from Homer and Shakespeare through the sentimental writers of the eightteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present.