Of the many innovative approaches to emerge during the twenty-first century, one of the most productive has been the interdisciplinary nexus of theories and methodologies broadly defined as “the study of emotions.” While this conceptual toolkit has generated significant insights, it has overwhelmingly focused on emotions as linguistic and semantic phenomena. This edited volume looks instead to the material aspects of emotion in German culture, encompassing the body, literature, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other themes.
Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world.
Everyone talks about their feelings, but what exactly are they? What are the distinguishing features of feelings, and how do they differ from emotions and affects? How do our feelings influence the kinds of people we are, and the sorts of communities and societies in which we live? In this wonderful short book, acclaimed author Stephen Frosh interrogates the terrain of feelings and asks how this ‘hidden’ dimension of the self helps shape our worlds. The book provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the major debates around feelings in the modern world. Feelings is an accessible and engaging resource for students, academics, and indeed anyone with an interest in gaining a better understanding of this fundamental area of life.
Emotions make history, and they have a history. They influence historical events such as revolutions, riots and protest movements. At the same time, they are shaped by historical experiences tied to family upbringing, educational and cultural institutions, work and the home. Writing the History of Emotions shows how emotions like love, trust, honour, pride, shame, empathy and greed have impacted historical change since the 18th century and were themselves dependent on social, political and economic environments. Importantly, this book provides a timely exploration of racialized, gendered, class-based notions of emotions. This exciting addition to Bloomsbury's successful Writing History series analyses how emotions matter in and to history, and how they are themselves objects of history. Here, leading scholar Ute Frevert eschews a traditional chronological history of emotions in favour of an innovative collection which transgresses time periods to illustrate the different emotional meanings one particular material object has had throughout history. This book sheds light on how emotions have been used, instrumentalised and manipulated both to propel and suspend democratic politics. In doing so, it opens a rich new avenue of research for the history of emotions.
Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.
Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.
For Miguel de Cervantes, to narrate a Mediterranean experience is to necessarily speak of an emotional experience. Affective Geographies takes as its point of departure the premise that literature is as influential in constructing the Mediterranean as are its geographic, climatic, or economic features. As the writer with the most vast and varied Mediterranean experience of his era, Cervantes is exceptionally well-suited for the critical task of recovering the literary Mediterranean. Engaging with the interdisciplinary fields of Mediterranean studies, affect theory, and the history of emotion, Paul Michael Johnson reads Cervantes’s texts alongside the affective structures that inscribe the Mediterranean as a space of conflict, commerce, expansion, and empire. In particular, he argues that Cervantes’s writing, with its uncommon focus on the Moorish, Islamic, and North African experience, can serve to realign misconceptions about the Mediterranean we have inherited today. Affective Geographies proposes that, with a more than four-hundred-year history of impacting the hearts and minds of readers, Cervantes’s works constitute a literary longue durée, ramifying beyond fiction to alter the popular imaginary and long-term cultural landscape.
Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces.
