Leticia Fernández-Fontecha
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042898
- eISBN:
- 9780252051753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042898.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter examines the disputed place of children’s pain around the dawn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the history of emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of ...
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This chapter examines the disputed place of children’s pain around the dawn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the history of emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of children’s suffering (cries and screams) was interpreted differently by various professional bodies with the performative authority to shape its meaning. Focusing on written texts and photographic practices, it compares the perspectives of scientists and psychologists with those of pediatricians, showing how the former claimed children were essentially insensitive to pain while the latter used pain to help diagnose children’s sickness. This paper questions whether specific expressions correspond mechanically and invariably to certain emotions, and shows how screams and cries created different “emotional bodies” in the pediatric and laboratory contexts.Less
This chapter examines the disputed place of children’s pain around the dawn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the history of emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of children’s suffering (cries and screams) was interpreted differently by various professional bodies with the performative authority to shape its meaning. Focusing on written texts and photographic practices, it compares the perspectives of scientists and psychologists with those of pediatricians, showing how the former claimed children were essentially insensitive to pain while the latter used pain to help diagnose children’s sickness. This paper questions whether specific expressions correspond mechanically and invariably to certain emotions, and shows how screams and cries created different “emotional bodies” in the pediatric and laboratory contexts.
Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042898
- eISBN:
- 9780252051753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042898.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume ...
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Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.Less
Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.
Stephanie Downes
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective ...
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The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.Less
The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.
Elizabeth Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between ...
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Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.Less
Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.
Margrit Pernau
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199497775
- eISBN:
- 9780190990831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199497775.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History, Social History
With this pioneering project, Margrit Pernau brings the ‘history of emotions’ approach to South Asian studies. A theoretically sophisticated and erudite investigation, Emotions and Modernity in ...
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With this pioneering project, Margrit Pernau brings the ‘history of emotions’ approach to South Asian studies. A theoretically sophisticated and erudite investigation, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India maps the history of emotions in India between the uprising of 1857 and World War I. Situating the prevalent experiences, interpretations, and practices of emotions of the time within the context of the major political events of colonial India, Pernau goes beyond the dominant narrative of colonial modernity and its fixation with discipline and restrain, and traces the contemporary transformation from a balance in emotions to the resurgence of fervor. The current volume is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many being explored for the first time. Pernau grounds her work on such diverse sources as philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality, advice literature, journals and newspapers, nostalgic descriptions of courtly culture, and even children’s literature. This close look into individual experiences, practices, and interpretations reveals the myriad emotions of the day, and the importance of these micro-histories in presenting an alternative account of colonial India.Less
With this pioneering project, Margrit Pernau brings the ‘history of emotions’ approach to South Asian studies. A theoretically sophisticated and erudite investigation, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India maps the history of emotions in India between the uprising of 1857 and World War I. Situating the prevalent experiences, interpretations, and practices of emotions of the time within the context of the major political events of colonial India, Pernau goes beyond the dominant narrative of colonial modernity and its fixation with discipline and restrain, and traces the contemporary transformation from a balance in emotions to the resurgence of fervor. The current volume is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many being explored for the first time. Pernau grounds her work on such diverse sources as philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality, advice literature, journals and newspapers, nostalgic descriptions of courtly culture, and even children’s literature. This close look into individual experiences, practices, and interpretations reveals the myriad emotions of the day, and the importance of these micro-histories in presenting an alternative account of colonial India.
Andrea Frisch
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694396
- eISBN:
- 9781474412322
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694396.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental ...
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This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, will ultimately serve the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Forgetting Differences tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to “move” readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. Subsequently, however, this orientation to both history and tragedy would be appropriated for other ends, utlimately helping to further absolutist ideologies of culture and politics that privileged affective over active readings of the past.Less
This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, will ultimately serve the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Forgetting Differences tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to “move” readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. Subsequently, however, this orientation to both history and tragedy would be appropriated for other ends, utlimately helping to further absolutist ideologies of culture and politics that privileged affective over active readings of the past.
James Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with ...
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James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textual face – the whole text as a kind of face – he applies the lessons learnt from facial recognition to textual recognition; and answers some possible objections to the paradox of knowing being dependent on having already known.Less
James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textual face – the whole text as a kind of face – he applies the lessons learnt from facial recognition to textual recognition; and answers some possible objections to the paradox of knowing being dependent on having already known.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of ...
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This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of Stephanie Trigg.Less
This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of Stephanie Trigg.
Louise D’Arcens
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. ...
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From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.Less
From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.
Paul Strohm
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Paul Strohm, both a biographer of Chaucer and a Chaucerian literary critic, meditates on what Chaucer might come to mean for those engaged with his life and poetic works. In a personal reflection on ...
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Paul Strohm, both a biographer of Chaucer and a Chaucerian literary critic, meditates on what Chaucer might come to mean for those engaged with his life and poetic works. In a personal reflection on writing about this medieval clerk and poet, Strohm explores the identification or transference that can occur during an intense study of an author, generating new insights into how our emotional investments are implicated in our ‘relationship’ with an author.Less
Paul Strohm, both a biographer of Chaucer and a Chaucerian literary critic, meditates on what Chaucer might come to mean for those engaged with his life and poetic works. In a personal reflection on writing about this medieval clerk and poet, Strohm explores the identification or transference that can occur during an intense study of an author, generating new insights into how our emotional investments are implicated in our ‘relationship’ with an author.
Peter J. A. Jones
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- December 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198843542
- eISBN:
- 9780191879364
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Medieval History, Social History
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began ...
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Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the book situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, the book exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, the book argues that England’s popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.Less
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the book situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, the book exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, the book argues that England’s popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.