Lucy Noakes
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780719087592
- eISBN:
- 9781526152015
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526135650.00004
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The introduction argues that death is central to warfare. Demonstrating that a variety of factors, including the dominant emotional economy of the war years, have meant that the dead of Second World ...
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The introduction argues that death is central to warfare. Demonstrating that a variety of factors, including the dominant emotional economy of the war years, have meant that the dead of Second World War Britain have been largely absent from the cultural memory of this conflict, it goes on to explain why it is important to write the history of death, grief and bereavement in wartime. It sets out the numbers of the dead, considers how they died, and provides an overview of the ways that the state attempted to manage wartime death. The chapter discusses the power of emotions in wartime, focusing on the disruptive potential of grief, and places this within a brief discussion of the ‘history of emotions’. Finally it sets out the three key arguments of the book, and provides a brief introduction to the themes of each chapter.Less
The introduction argues that death is central to warfare. Demonstrating that a variety of factors, including the dominant emotional economy of the war years, have meant that the dead of Second World War Britain have been largely absent from the cultural memory of this conflict, it goes on to explain why it is important to write the history of death, grief and bereavement in wartime. It sets out the numbers of the dead, considers how they died, and provides an overview of the ways that the state attempted to manage wartime death. The chapter discusses the power of emotions in wartime, focusing on the disruptive potential of grief, and places this within a brief discussion of the ‘history of emotions’. Finally it sets out the three key arguments of the book, and provides a brief introduction to the themes of each chapter.
Ilya Vinitsky
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823264858
- eISBN:
- 9780823266852
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter takes a close look at Veselovsky’s 1904 work on Vasily Zhukovsky, demonstrating that Veselovsky develops a rigorous “poetics of psychological biography,” in which the emotional world of ...
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This chapter takes a close look at Veselovsky’s 1904 work on Vasily Zhukovsky, demonstrating that Veselovsky develops a rigorous “poetics of psychological biography,” in which the emotional world of an individual is approached as a product of a given cultural-historical moment, “the age of Sensibility” (or Sentimentalism). Imported literary texts emerge as crucial to these processes of self-formation, and the objective of Veselovsky’s psychological biography is to trace the ways in which a historical individual, existing within a close-knit community of friends, is able to fashion “alien” cultural goods into an authentic expression of his emotional life. As Vinitsky stresses, Veselovsky anticipates both Lotman’s semiotic approach to “poetics of behavior” and recent work on the history of emotions. Following Veselovsky’s lead, Vinitsky offers a close analysis of one formative moment of literary appropriation: a failed dramatic performance staged by the adolescent Zhukovsky, using a sentimentalist plot to reflect on, and possibly influence, his own position as a bastard son in a nobleman’s family.Less
This chapter takes a close look at Veselovsky’s 1904 work on Vasily Zhukovsky, demonstrating that Veselovsky develops a rigorous “poetics of psychological biography,” in which the emotional world of an individual is approached as a product of a given cultural-historical moment, “the age of Sensibility” (or Sentimentalism). Imported literary texts emerge as crucial to these processes of self-formation, and the objective of Veselovsky’s psychological biography is to trace the ways in which a historical individual, existing within a close-knit community of friends, is able to fashion “alien” cultural goods into an authentic expression of his emotional life. As Vinitsky stresses, Veselovsky anticipates both Lotman’s semiotic approach to “poetics of behavior” and recent work on the history of emotions. Following Veselovsky’s lead, Vinitsky offers a close analysis of one formative moment of literary appropriation: a failed dramatic performance staged by the adolescent Zhukovsky, using a sentimentalist plot to reflect on, and possibly influence, his own position as a bastard son in a nobleman’s family.
William M. Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226126340
- eISBN:
- 9780226126517
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226126517.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter establishes three important themes of the book. First an historiographic observation: the history of emotion is in some important way a corollary to a history of personhood. Second a ...
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This chapter establishes three important themes of the book. First an historiographic observation: the history of emotion is in some important way a corollary to a history of personhood. Second a methodological injunction: when studying emotion, one should be able to characterize the relationship between the subject and object of analysis. Third a critique of “two cultures“: the work of humanists and scientists is not incommensurable; humanists and scientists share significant interests in emotion studies. Humanists with the epistemological commitments and training associated with interpretive method, and ethnographic, cultural, and literary readings, should recognize that their own research and critical reflection on their own methods in fact align them closely with versions of appraisal theory, emotion regulation theory, and non-modular understandings of neural functioning. Indeed those working in the humanities run the risk of placing themselves in performative contradiction when they step back and view the modern science of emotion strictly as historians.Less
This chapter establishes three important themes of the book. First an historiographic observation: the history of emotion is in some important way a corollary to a history of personhood. Second a methodological injunction: when studying emotion, one should be able to characterize the relationship between the subject and object of analysis. Third a critique of “two cultures“: the work of humanists and scientists is not incommensurable; humanists and scientists share significant interests in emotion studies. Humanists with the epistemological commitments and training associated with interpretive method, and ethnographic, cultural, and literary readings, should recognize that their own research and critical reflection on their own methods in fact align them closely with versions of appraisal theory, emotion regulation theory, and non-modular understandings of neural functioning. Indeed those working in the humanities run the risk of placing themselves in performative contradiction when they step back and view the modern science of emotion strictly as historians.
Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719090783
- eISBN:
- 9781781708866
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090783.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the ...
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Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.Less
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.
Kathryn D. Temple
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479895274
- eISBN:
- 9781479832637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479895274.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Legal History
This chapter establishes Blackstone's prominence, discusses his influence on Enlightenment thought about law and justice, and reveals his investment in legal emotions as related to harmonic justice. ...
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This chapter establishes Blackstone's prominence, discusses his influence on Enlightenment thought about law and justice, and reveals his investment in legal emotions as related to harmonic justice. In a reading of his early poem “The Lawyer's Farewel,” it introduces Blackstone's poetics and illustrates methods of both close and surface reading common to literary analysis. The chapter argues that although Blackstone has been the subject of historical study, both Law and Humanities and history of emotions approaches can further illuminate Blackstone's method and impact. The chapter argues for a curatorial approach to Blackstone's work that takes into account his exercise of affective aesthetics and its impact on the history of emotions in law. It closes with a summary of the chapters to come and an argument in favor of foregrounding aesthetics and emotion in legal studies.Less
This chapter establishes Blackstone's prominence, discusses his influence on Enlightenment thought about law and justice, and reveals his investment in legal emotions as related to harmonic justice. In a reading of his early poem “The Lawyer's Farewel,” it introduces Blackstone's poetics and illustrates methods of both close and surface reading common to literary analysis. The chapter argues that although Blackstone has been the subject of historical study, both Law and Humanities and history of emotions approaches can further illuminate Blackstone's method and impact. The chapter argues for a curatorial approach to Blackstone's work that takes into account his exercise of affective aesthetics and its impact on the history of emotions in law. It closes with a summary of the chapters to come and an argument in favor of foregrounding aesthetics and emotion in legal studies.
Steven Mullaney
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226547633
- eISBN:
- 9780226117096
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; ...
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The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.Less
The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.
Rob Boddice
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040580
- eISBN:
- 9780252099021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040580.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Sets the framework of the book within contemporary theories of the history of emotions and the history of morality, making a case for the use of ‘moral economy’ as an analytical category that ...
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Sets the framework of the book within contemporary theories of the history of emotions and the history of morality, making a case for the use of ‘moral economy’ as an analytical category that connects theories of the biological evolution of civilized emotions to scientific practices of those theories. The Darwinian explanation of sympathy thus becomes a scientific practice of sympathy, both defining the self and the meaning of scientific moral action, and a raft of public policies and research agendas.Less
Sets the framework of the book within contemporary theories of the history of emotions and the history of morality, making a case for the use of ‘moral economy’ as an analytical category that connects theories of the biological evolution of civilized emotions to scientific practices of those theories. The Darwinian explanation of sympathy thus becomes a scientific practice of sympathy, both defining the self and the meaning of scientific moral action, and a raft of public policies and research agendas.
Sabine Arnaud
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226275543
- eISBN:
- 9780226275680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226275680.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Men and women of letters used the description of vaporous fits to exemplify the relationship between body and mind irrespective of medical concerns. This chapter examines how the Republic of Letters ...
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Men and women of letters used the description of vaporous fits to exemplify the relationship between body and mind irrespective of medical concerns. This chapter examines how the Republic of Letters itself adopted and challenged the theme of vapors. In works by Diderot, La Mettrie, C.J. de B. de Paumerelle, Le Camus, and Chassaignon, vapors and hysteric affections were called upon to name inner turmoil, distress, embarrassment, and physiological disorders. These terms were also ways to consider modernity, the human species, women, or even literary creation. Because of their spectacular symptoms, the vapors are repeatedly invoked in these texts as an ideal tool to manipulate either the sufferer’s entourage or his or her own faculties, which are pushed into unexplored domains. The force of the vapors is made to exemplify or stimulate the role of the body in sensibility and creativity. Using these notions, men and women of letters were participating in a move to fashion sensibility and acknowledge contradictory conceptions of physiological phenomena.Less
Men and women of letters used the description of vaporous fits to exemplify the relationship between body and mind irrespective of medical concerns. This chapter examines how the Republic of Letters itself adopted and challenged the theme of vapors. In works by Diderot, La Mettrie, C.J. de B. de Paumerelle, Le Camus, and Chassaignon, vapors and hysteric affections were called upon to name inner turmoil, distress, embarrassment, and physiological disorders. These terms were also ways to consider modernity, the human species, women, or even literary creation. Because of their spectacular symptoms, the vapors are repeatedly invoked in these texts as an ideal tool to manipulate either the sufferer’s entourage or his or her own faculties, which are pushed into unexplored domains. The force of the vapors is made to exemplify or stimulate the role of the body in sensibility and creativity. Using these notions, men and women of letters were participating in a move to fashion sensibility and acknowledge contradictory conceptions of physiological phenomena.
Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226126340
- eISBN:
- 9780226126517
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226126517.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This book brings together leading representatives of the history of emotions with specialists from other disciplines including literature, rhetoric, sociology, and neuroscience. It is organized by ...
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This book brings together leading representatives of the history of emotions with specialists from other disciplines including literature, rhetoric, sociology, and neuroscience. It is organized by disciplines in which emotions have featured prominently, including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the social sciences, in each case bringing a humanities perspective to bear. Interpretive approaches – including critical, historical, rhetorical, and narratological – provide the methodology because they are sensitive to changing scientific perspectives on emotions, and they are also best equipped to place the sciences of emotion into larger social and cultural contexts. Key questions include the following: What happened to the pre-1945 academic preoccupation with emotions? Why and by what disciplinary means were “emotions” as a category increasingly marginalized and delegitimated in the sciences and humanities after 1945? What prompted a gradual rediscovery of emotions as an analytical category and as an object of research from the 1960s onward? In answering these questions, this book seeks to provide greater historical depth to the current fascination with emotions across a wide range of academic disciplines. A central claim of the book is that the relatively recent (1990s and 2000s) neuroscientific study of emotion did not initiate – but instead consolidated – the emotional turn by clearing the ground for a range of work on the emotions, now unencumbered by the post-war stigma of irrationalism. Emotion studies in the social sciences and even in the humanities now can work around the postwar binaries of reason vs. emotion, rationality vs. irrationalism.Less
This book brings together leading representatives of the history of emotions with specialists from other disciplines including literature, rhetoric, sociology, and neuroscience. It is organized by disciplines in which emotions have featured prominently, including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the social sciences, in each case bringing a humanities perspective to bear. Interpretive approaches – including critical, historical, rhetorical, and narratological – provide the methodology because they are sensitive to changing scientific perspectives on emotions, and they are also best equipped to place the sciences of emotion into larger social and cultural contexts. Key questions include the following: What happened to the pre-1945 academic preoccupation with emotions? Why and by what disciplinary means were “emotions” as a category increasingly marginalized and delegitimated in the sciences and humanities after 1945? What prompted a gradual rediscovery of emotions as an analytical category and as an object of research from the 1960s onward? In answering these questions, this book seeks to provide greater historical depth to the current fascination with emotions across a wide range of academic disciplines. A central claim of the book is that the relatively recent (1990s and 2000s) neuroscientific study of emotion did not initiate – but instead consolidated – the emotional turn by clearing the ground for a range of work on the emotions, now unencumbered by the post-war stigma of irrationalism. Emotion studies in the social sciences and even in the humanities now can work around the postwar binaries of reason vs. emotion, rationality vs. irrationalism.
Brenton J. Malin
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814762790
- eISBN:
- 9780814770153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814762790.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter draws on Leo Marx and Peter Stearns in tracing America's rhetoric of the technological sublime, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of emotion. A belief in ...
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This chapter draws on Leo Marx and Peter Stearns in tracing America's rhetoric of the technological sublime, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of emotion. A belief in the uniqueness of the new American frontier played a fundamental role in the country's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological and emotional rhetorics. This larger history fed into the technological and emotional rhetorics of the early twentieth-century United States, which is described as high-speed and chaotic, with automobiles and other developing technologies contributing to such perspectives. This sense of intensity established a belief in the uniqueness of the period that encouraged the strong rhetorics of sublimity, which then pervades various discussions of technology and emotion. It was this sense of emotional and technological power that set the stage for the era's growing wave of media physicalism.Less
This chapter draws on Leo Marx and Peter Stearns in tracing America's rhetoric of the technological sublime, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of emotion. A belief in the uniqueness of the new American frontier played a fundamental role in the country's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological and emotional rhetorics. This larger history fed into the technological and emotional rhetorics of the early twentieth-century United States, which is described as high-speed and chaotic, with automobiles and other developing technologies contributing to such perspectives. This sense of intensity established a belief in the uniqueness of the period that encouraged the strong rhetorics of sublimity, which then pervades various discussions of technology and emotion. It was this sense of emotional and technological power that set the stage for the era's growing wave of media physicalism.
Stephen J. Spencer
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198833369
- eISBN:
- 9780191871887
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198833369.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Medieval History, Cultural History
The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to ...
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The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to simultaneously respond to the theoretical principles associated with the linguistic turn. Relevant crusades scholarship is then surveyed, including the long historiographical tradition of seeking to reconstruct participants’ beliefs and ideologies from historical narratives, before outlining the book’s structure and arguments. An overview of the core sources which form the backbone of this study follows, with the intention of introducing uninitiated readers to the breadth and diversity of sources available to historians of the crusades.Less
The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to simultaneously respond to the theoretical principles associated with the linguistic turn. Relevant crusades scholarship is then surveyed, including the long historiographical tradition of seeking to reconstruct participants’ beliefs and ideologies from historical narratives, before outlining the book’s structure and arguments. An overview of the core sources which form the backbone of this study follows, with the intention of introducing uninitiated readers to the breadth and diversity of sources available to historians of the crusades.
Christopher Rea
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520283848
- eISBN:
- 9780520959590
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520283848.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Why was China’s entrance into the modern age accompanied by a laugh track? The early twentieth-century Chinese press is replete with invective, self-mockery, and sarcastic commentary, as well as word ...
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Why was China’s entrance into the modern age accompanied by a laugh track? The early twentieth-century Chinese press is replete with invective, self-mockery, and sarcastic commentary, as well as word games, jokes, and parodies. Writers compiled jokes in columns they called “histories of laughter,” which appeared alongside “histories of pain,” as well as other genres indicative of an outlook that viewed China’s past, present, and future primarily in terms of emotion. This book explores the modern history of laughter through the Chinese vocabulary of mirth. The Chinese phrase for “to break into laughter” (shixiao), taken literally, for example, means “to lose laughter.” One fictional “history of laughter” from the 1920s even tells a story of the loss of spontaneous mirth. This book, too, reveals a lost history—one overshadowed by a discourse of trauma. If focuses on the various intonations of laughter of late Qing and Republican China, the cultures they fostered, and their influence on the course of modern Chinese history.Less
Why was China’s entrance into the modern age accompanied by a laugh track? The early twentieth-century Chinese press is replete with invective, self-mockery, and sarcastic commentary, as well as word games, jokes, and parodies. Writers compiled jokes in columns they called “histories of laughter,” which appeared alongside “histories of pain,” as well as other genres indicative of an outlook that viewed China’s past, present, and future primarily in terms of emotion. This book explores the modern history of laughter through the Chinese vocabulary of mirth. The Chinese phrase for “to break into laughter” (shixiao), taken literally, for example, means “to lose laughter.” One fictional “history of laughter” from the 1920s even tells a story of the loss of spontaneous mirth. This book, too, reveals a lost history—one overshadowed by a discourse of trauma. If focuses on the various intonations of laughter of late Qing and Republican China, the cultures they fostered, and their influence on the course of modern Chinese history.
Laura Kounine
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198799085
- eISBN:
- 9780191839580
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, Cultural History
This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of ...
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This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.Less
This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.
Joseph Ben Prestel
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198797562
- eISBN:
- 9780191839009
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198797562.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric ...
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The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric tendencies have led to a separation between historical studies on cities in these two regions. It shows how a comparison between Berlin and Cairo contributes to the study of potential parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East. It is in this context that the history of emotions opens up a new perspective. While older comparative studies have focused on the origins of urban change, the introduction argues that a history of emotions shifts the focus towards the study of how contemporaries negotiated urban change. In this way, the history of emotions helps to overcome Eurocentric pitfalls and offers the possibility of a more global urban history, in which the histories of Berlin and Cairo begin to speak to each other.Less
The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric tendencies have led to a separation between historical studies on cities in these two regions. It shows how a comparison between Berlin and Cairo contributes to the study of potential parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East. It is in this context that the history of emotions opens up a new perspective. While older comparative studies have focused on the origins of urban change, the introduction argues that a history of emotions shifts the focus towards the study of how contemporaries negotiated urban change. In this way, the history of emotions helps to overcome Eurocentric pitfalls and offers the possibility of a more global urban history, in which the histories of Berlin and Cairo begin to speak to each other.
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- February 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198802648
- eISBN:
- 9780191840944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198802648.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, European Medieval History
This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and ...
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This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.Less
This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.
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.
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.
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.
Joanna Innes and Michael J. Braddick
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198748267
- eISBN:
- 9780191810923
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198748267.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Cultural History
The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, ...
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The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.Less
The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.
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.