Romanticism and the Emotions

Joel Faflak, Richard C. Sha

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107052390
• eBook ISBN:
  9781139699372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The motion behind Romantic emotion: Towards a chemistry and physics of feeling
• Chapter 2 A certain mediocrity: Adam Smith’s moral behaviorism
• Chapter 3 Like love: The feel of Shelley’s similes
• Chapter 4 Jane Austen and the persuasion of happiness
• Chapter 5 The General Fast and Humiliation: Tracking feeling in wartime
• Chapter 6 A peculiar community: Mary Shelley, Godwin, and the abyss of emotion
• Chapter 7 Emotion without content: Primary affect and pure potentiality in Wordsworth
• Chapter 8 Kant's peace, Wordsworth's slumber
• Chapter 9 Living a ruined life: De Quincey’s damage
• Bibliography
• Index