Romanticism and the Emotions

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.Introduction: feeling Romanticism Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha; 1. The motion behind Romantic emotion: towards a chemistry and physics of feeling Richard C. Sha; 2. 'A certain mediocrity': Adam Smith's moral behaviourism Thomas Pfau; 3. Like love: the feel of Shelley's similes Julie Carlson; 4. Jane Austen and the persuasion of happiness Joel Faflak; 5. The general fast and humiliation: tracking feeling in wartime Mary A. Favret; 6. A peculiar community: Mary Shelley, Godwin, and the abyss of emotion Tilottama Rajan; 7. Emotion without content: primary affect and pure potentiality in Wordsworth David Collings; 8. Kant's peace, Wordsworth's slumber Jacques Khalip; 9. Living a ruined life: De Quincey's damage Rei Terada.