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The first essay collection to examine emotion across the span of Romantic literature and thought, in light of new scholarship.
Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn't even always something we consciously feel. However, love -- like other emotions, both conscious and not -- is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
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.
An exploration of Stoicism’s central role in British and American writing of the Romantic period Stoic philosophers and Romantic writers might seem to have nothing in common: the ancient Stoics championed the elimination of emotion, and Romantic writers made a bold new case for expression, adopting “powerful feeling” as the bedrock of poetry. Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion refutes this notion by demonstrating that Romantic-era writers devoted a surprising amount of attention to Stoicism and its dispassionate mandate. Jacob Risinger explores the subterranean but vital life of Stoic philosophy in British and American Romanticism, from William Wordsworth to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He shows that the Romantic era—the period most polemically invested in emotion as art’s mainspring—was also captivated by the Stoic idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded the transcendence of emotion. Risinger argues that Stoicism was a central preoccupation in a world destabilized by the French Revolution. Creating a space for the skeptical evaluation of feeling and affect, Stoicism became the subject of poetic reflection, ethical inquiry, and political debate. Risinger examines Wordsworth’s affinity with William Godwin’s evolving philosophy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s attempt to embed Stoic reflection within the lyric itself, Lord Byron’s depiction of Stoicism at the level of character, visions of a Stoic future in novels by Mary Shelley and Sarah Scott, and the Stoic foundations of Emerson’s arguments for self-reliance and social reform. Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion illustrates how the austerity of ancient philosophy was not inimical to Romantic creativity, but vital to its realization.
Originally published in 2000, this was the first volume to examine adolescent romantic relationships.
Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything “neuro.” On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since “emotional intelligence” emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian’s point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.
This authoritative handbook reviews the breadth of current knowledge about positive emotions: their nature, functions, and consequences for individuals and society. Specific emotions are analyzed in depth, including happiness, pride, romantic love, compassion, gratitude, awe, challenge, and hope. Major theoretical perspectives are presented and cutting-edge research methods explained. The volume addresses neurobiological and physiological aspects of positive emotions as well as their social and intrapersonal contexts. Implications for physical health, coping, and psychopathology are explored, as are connections to organizational functioning and consumer behavior.
This book is an account of the psychology of romantic love in the context of a theory of emotions. The account develops out of studies in brain psychology and the extension to topics in process-philosophy, such as the nature of value and belief, and the central role of feeling in mental process. The approach is subjectivist, that is, from the internal standpoint, and in this respect it differs greatly from the externalist and objectivist trends in modern cognitive science and empiricist philosophy. Love is the ultimate in value, so that a theory of love is also a theory of the nature of value and its relation to feeling, belief, and to drive and desire. The role of intention, reason, and appraisal is critiqued. The relation to other feelings, such as jealousy, envy, anger, loss and grief is discussed in terms of a general theory of emotion and the basis in a process account of the mind/brain state.
Between 1780 and 1920, modern conceptions of emotion-conceptions still very much present in the 21st century-first took shape. This book traces that history, charting the changing meaning and experience of feelings in an era shaped by political and market revolutions, romanticism, empiricism, the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis. During this period, the word emotion itself gained currency, gradually supplanting older vocabularies and visions of feeling. Terms to describe feelings changed; so too did conceptions of emotions' proper role in politics, economics, and culture. Political upheavals turned a spotlight on the role of feeling in public life; in domestic life, sentimental bonds gained new importance, as families were transformed from productive units to emotional ones. From the halls of parliaments to the familial hearth, from the art museum to the theatre, from the pulpit to the concert hall, lively debates over feelings raged across the 19th century.
This book comprises eleven essays by leading scholars of early nineteenth-century British literature and periodical culture. The collection addresses the many and varied links between politics and the emotions in Romantic periodicals, from the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, to the 1832 Reform Bill. In so doing, it deepens our understanding of the often conflicted relations between politics and feelings, and raises questions relevant to contemporary debates on affect studies and their relation to political criticism. The respective chapters explore both the politics of emotion and the emotional register of political discussion in radical, reformist and conservative periodicals. They are arranged chronologically, covering periodicals from Pigs’ Meat to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Spectator. Recurring themes include the contested place of emotion in radical political discourse; the role of the periodical in mediating action and performance; the changing affective frameworks of cultural politics (especially concerning gender and nation), and the shifting terrain of what constitutes appropriate emotion in public political discourse.
