Reading the early modern passions : essays in the cultural history of emotion / edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Paster, Gail Kern.

Rowe, Katherine.

Floyd-Wilson, Mary.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European literature--Renaissance, 1450-1600--History and criticism.

European literature.

European literature--17th century--History and criticism.

Emotions in literature.

Physical Description:

vi, 384 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2004]

Summary:

How translatable is the language of the emotions across cultures and time? What connotations of particular emotions, strongly felt in the early modern period, have faded or shifted completely in our own? If Western culture has traditionally held emotion to be hostile to reason and the production of scientific knowledge, why and how have the passions been lauded as windows to higher truths? Assessing the changing discourses of feeling and their relevance to the cultural history of affect, Reading the Early Modern Passions offers fourteen interdisciplinary essays on the meanings and representations of the emotional universe of Renaissance Europe in literature, music, and art. Many in the early modern era were preoccupied by the relation of passion to action and believed the passions to be a natural force requiring stringent mental and physical disciplines. In speaking to the question of the historicity and variability of emotions within individuals, several of these essays investigate specific emotions -- sadness, courage, and fear. Other essays turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences, in both social practice and theory. Addressing anxieties about the power of emotions; their relation to the public good; their centrality in promoting or disturbing an individual's relation to God, to monarch, and to fellow human beings, the authors also look at the ways in which emotion serves as a marker or determinant of gender, ethnicity, and humanity.

Contents:

Against the rule of reason / Richard Strier

Commotion strange / Michael Schoenfeldt

Poses and passions / Zirka Z. Filipczak

Compassion in the public sphere of Milton and King Charles / John Staines

Melancholy cats, lugged bears, and early modern cosmology / Gail Kern Paster

English mettle / Mary Floyd-Wilson

Hearing green / Bruce Smith

Humoral knowledge and liberal cognition in Davenant's Macbeth / Katherine Rowe

Five pictures of pathos / Gary Tomlinson

Passions and the interests in early modern Europe / Victoria Kaln

Sadness in The faerie queene / Douglas Trevor

Par accident / Jane Tylus

Strange alteration / Timothy Hampton.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0812237609

0812218728

OCLC:

53276651