Cheerfulness

A Literary and Cultural History

Timothy Hampton

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781942130604
• eBook ISBN:
  9781942130628
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

A timely story of a forgotten emotion

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness — a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit — functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology, Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has never before been systematically traced.

Index

• ADAGIA (ERASMUS), 41.
• Adorno, Theodor, 20, 215, 219, 260 n.1; “Is Art Cheerful?,” 211–13; Notes to Literature, 211.
• Affect, 14, 53, 100–101, 105, 109, 115, 142, 144–46, 170, 180; commodification of, 200; transmission of, 99–100.
• African Americans: depiction in film, 220, 221; enslaved, 214–15; nation building, 214–15.
• African American song, 214–15.
• Ahmed, Sara, 14, 76.
• Alacrity (alacritas), 22, 44, 56, 65, 70, 103, 161.
• Alexander the Great, 92.
• Alger, Horatio, 16, 146–50.
• Allegrezza, 23.
• All Stars, 219.
• Ambition, 16, 20, 72, 120, 133–36, 142–46, 150–51, 170, 199, 224.
• American malaise, 202–205.
• American optimism, 201–202, 208.
• Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 11–12.
• A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, 216.
• Ariosto, Ludovico, 23.
• Aristotle, 12, 52–53, 90.
• Armstrong, Louis, 213–14, 215–16, 224, 225, 226; Hello, Dolly!, 221; “Hot Sevens” sessions, 218; I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, 217–18; “Mack the Knife,” 218–20; “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” 217; “Shine,” 216–17.
• Arnoullet, Olivier, 39.
• Augustine, Saint, 58–59, 207.
• Austen, Henry, 118.
• Austen, Jane, 117, 133, 135–36, 197, 198, 224; and characters as “readers,” 124–28, 131; death of, 118, 227; Mansfield Park, 131; and narrative of cheer, 129–30; Northanger Abbey, 118, 119, 120; Persuasion, 118, 119–20; Pride and Pre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: A Contagion, a Power
• One: Early Modern Cheerfulness
• Two: Cheerful Economies and Bourgeois Culture
• Three: Modern Cheerfulness
• Conclusion: Cheer in Pandemic Days
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index