Rethinking Feeling

On the Renegotiation of Emotions in German Novels at the Fin de Siècle

Holly A. Yanacek

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765158425
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Holly A. Yanacek traces a new history of emotions through the German novel, showing how long before social media existed, literature and art played important roles in negotiating emotions with moral values as well as shaping public cultures of feeling.

Rethinking Feeling examines the literary renegotiation of emotion at the Jahrhundertwende, the turn of the century, a period of rapid cultural change when 19th-century moral values were destabilized and ideas about how one should think and feel became contested topics of debate. The re-evaluation of moral values around 1900 was inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings influenced groups across the political and social spectrum in Wilhelmine Germany (1890-1918) and opened up spaces to think and to feel differently.

This book builds upon interdisciplinary research in emotion studies, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, and narrative theory to develop a new way of reading emotion in narrative prose works. The literary analyses in Rethinking Feeling break new ground in interpreting influential works by Thomas Mann, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Theodor Fontane, and Hedwig Dohm as its analysis offers a new way of understanding the role of emotion in literary and cultural history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking and Feeling Differently around 1900: Heteropathia as a Method of Reading
• 1 Honor and Compassion: Responding Ethically to Adultery in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895)
• 2 Shame and Love: Challenging Gendered Feeling Rules in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka (1898)
• 3 Pride and Decadent Sensibility: Renegotiating Emotions through Art in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901)
• 4 Anger and Hope: Forging a Feminist Future in Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland (1902)
• Epilogue: Rethinking Emotions Then and Now
• Bibliography
• Index