Download or read book The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Jonathan Lamb and published by Pickering & Chatto Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre and torture.

Download or read book The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Jonathan Lamb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.

Download or read book The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Jonathan Lamb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.

Download or read book Passions Sympathy and Print Culture written by Heather Kerr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores ways in which passions came to be conceived, performed and authenticated in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. It considers satire and sympathy in various environments, ranging from popular novels and journalism, through philosophical studies of the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.

Download or read book The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century written by Albert J. Rivero and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.

Download or read book The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination written by Roman Alexander Barton and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-20 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Download or read book The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy written by Michael Cameron and published by . This book was released on 2024-03-20 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element explores the theme of 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels. A liminal site of both possibility and irreconcilability, Gothic sympathy at once challenges the anthropocentric bias of traditional notions of sympathetic concern, premising compassionate relations with other beings - animal, vegetal, etc. - beyond the standard measure of the liberal-humanist subject, and at the same time acknowledges the horror that is the ineluctable and untranslatable otherness accompanying, interrupting, and shaping such a sympathetic connection. Many examples of 'Last Man' fiction explore the dialectical impasse of Gothic sympathy by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction. Such confrontations as they appear in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend will be explored.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century written by D. Christopher Gabbard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, 'deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorter than the other, the man is deformed; because there is something wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man'. During the long 18th century, new ideas from aesthetics and the emerging scientific disciplines of physics, biology and zoology contributed to changing fundamental notions about human form, function and ability. The interrelated concepts of the natural and the beautiful coalesced into a hegemonic ideology of form, one which defined communal standards regarding which aspects of human appearance and ability would be considered typical and socially acceptable and which would not. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century explores such themes and topics as: atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.

Download or read book Letters and the Body 1700 1830 written by Sarah Goldsmith and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women's and men’s letters written from and to Britain, North America, Europe, India and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite. In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into published forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Part I explores the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed. Part II examines the letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. Part III focuses on how correspondents purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’. This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies, cultural history and literature.

Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Download or read book Political Economy and the Novel written by Sarah Comyn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of ‘Homo Economicus’ provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure’s significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts – Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations – and Henry Fielding’s A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.

Download or read book Weeping Britannia written by Thomas Dixon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a persistent myth about the British: that we are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia - the first history of crying in Britain - comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the 'national character', the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of our past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which we express and understand our emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.

Download or read book Vicarious Narratives written by Jeanne M. Britton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) defines sympathy as a series of shifts in perspective by which one sees from a different point of view. British and French novels published over the following century redefine sympathy through narrative form—shifting perspectives or 'stories within stories' in which one character adopts the voice and perspective of another. Fiction follows Smith's emphasis on sympathy's shifting perspectives, but this formal echo coincides with a challenge. For Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers, the experience of sympathy relies on human resemblance. In novels, by contrast, characters who are separated by nationality, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate such differences. Encounters between these characters produce shifts in perspective or framed tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell her story, echoing Smith's definition of sympathy in their form while challenging Enlightenment philosophy's insistence on human resemblance. Works of sentimental and gothic fiction published between 1750 and 1850 generate a novelistic version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices (the anthology, the novelistic extract). Second-hand stories transform the vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives associated with the declining genre of epistolary fiction into the narrative levels and shifting speakers of nineteenth-century frame tales. Vicarious Narratives argues that fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative—by listening to, re-telling, and transcribing the stories of others.

Download or read book An Archaeology of Sympathy written by James Chandler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

Download or read book The Discourse of Sensibility written by Henry Martyn Lloyd and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reconstructs the body of sensibility and the discourse which constructed it. The discourse of sensibility was deployed very widely throughout the mid- to late-eighteenth century, particularly in France and Britain. To inquire into the body of sensibility is then necessarily to enter into an interdisciplinary space and so to invite the plurality of methodological approaches which this collection exemplifies. The chapters collected here draw together the histories of literature and aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology, moral theory, medicine, and cultural history. Together, they contribute to four major themes: First, the collection reconstructs various modes by which the sympathetic subject was construed or scripted, including through the theatre, poetry, literature, and medical and philosophical treaties. It secondly draws out those techniques of affective pedagogy which were implied by the medicalisation of the knowing body, and thirdly highlights the manner in which the body of sensibility was constructed as simultaneously particular and universal. Finally, it illustrates the ‘centrifugal forces’ at play within the discourse, and the anxiety which often accompanied them. At the centre of eighteenth-century thought was a very particular object: the body of sensibility, the Enlightenment’s knowing body. The persona of the knowledge-seeker was constructed by drawing together mind and matter, thought and feeling. And so where the Enlightenment thinker is generally associated with reason, truth-telling, and social and political reform, the Enlightenment is also known for its valorisation of emotion. During the period, intellectual pursuits were envisioned as having a distinctly embodied and emotional aspect. The body of ‘sensibility’ encompassed these apparently disparate strands and was associated with terms including ‘sentimental’, ‘sentiment’, ‘sense’, ‘sensation’, and ‘sympathy’.

Download or read book Reader in Tragedy written by Marcus Nevitt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

Download or read book The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man 1660 1800 written by John Morillo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Man illuminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect, and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, including well-known poets, important authors who mixed art and science, and largely forgotten writers of sermons and children’s stories all offered innovative alternatives to conventional narratives about the meaning of animals in early modern Europe. They question Descartes’ claim that animals are essentially soulless machines incapable of thought or feelings. British writers from 1660-1800 remain informed by Cartesianism, but often counter it by recognizing that feelings are as important as reason when it comes to defining animal life and its relation to human life. This British line of thought deviates from Descartes by focusing on fine feeling as a register of moral life empowered by sensibility and sympathy, but this very stance is complicated by cultural fears that too much kindness to animals can entail too much kinship with them—fears made famous in the later reaction to Darwinian evolution. The Riseof Animals uncovers ideological tensions between sympathy for animals and a need to defend the special status of humans from the rapidly developing Darwinian perspective. The writers it examines engage in complex negotiations with sensibility and a wide range of philosophical and theological traditions. Their work anticipates posthumanist thought and the challenges it poses to traditional humanist values within the humanities and beyond. The Rise of Animals is a sophisticated intellectual history of the origins of our changing attitudes about animals that at the same time illuminates major currents of eighteenth-century British literary culture.