Romanticism and the Emotions
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st ed, 3/13/2014
EAN 9781107052390, ISBN10: 1107052394
Hardcover, 296 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the importance of the emotions in Romantic literature and thought. This collection, the first to stress the centrality of the emotions to Romanticism, addresses a complex range of issues including the relation of affect to figuration and knowing, emotions and the discipline of knowledge, the motivational powers of emotion, and emotions as a shared ground of meaning. Contributors offer significant new insights on the ways in which a wide range of Romantic writers, including Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Immanuel Kant, Lord Byron, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and Adam Smith, worried about the emotions as a register of human experience. Though varied in scope, the essays are united by the argument that the current affective and emotional turn in the humanities benefits from a Romantic scepticism about the relations between language, emotion and agency.
Introduction
feeling Romanticism Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha
1. The motion behind Romantic emotion
towards a chemistry and physics of feeling Richard C. Sha
2. 'A certain mediocrity'
Adam Smith's moral behaviourism Thomas Pfau
3. Like love
the feel of Shelley's similes Julie Carlson
4. Jane Austen and the persuasion of happiness Joel Faflak
5. The general fast and humiliation
tracking feeling in wartime Mary A. Favret
6. A peculiar community
Mary Shelley, Godwin, and the abyss of emotion Tilottama Rajan
7. Emotion without content
primary affect and pure potentiality in Wordsworth David Collings
8. Kant's peace, Wordsworth's slumber Jacques Khalip
9. Living a ruined life
De Quincey's damage Rei Terada.