Emotions as Engines of History

ISBN-13: 9781032100531 / Angielski

Rafal Boryslawski; Alicja Bemben

Opis

Driven by their curiosity about how emotional catalysts function in history, the volume’s authors offer a collection of texts that give insight into the emotional aspects of particular events, processes, texts, and works of history; they show how history happens because of emotions.

Seeking to bridge the gap between various approaches to the study of emotions, this volume aims at a multidisciplinary examination of connections between emotions and history and the ways in which these connections have manifested themselves in historiography, cultural, and literary studies. The book offers a selected range of insights into the idea of emotions, affects, and emotionality as driving forces and agents of change in history. The fifteen essays it comprises probe into the emotional motives and dispositions behind both historical phenomena and the ways they were narrated.

Spis treści

Introduction: Emotions as the Engines of Change  Part 1: Narrating Past Emotions  1. The Wonders of Creation: The Affective Poetics of Alterity in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle  2. Nice Guys Finish Last: Emotional Leaders and Political Action in Selected Íslendingasögur  3. The Deceit of Emotions: Henry More’s Conception of Passion and Religious Polemic in Early Modern England  4. How British Lyric Poetry Came to be Angry After Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips  5. Empathy, "Empathic Unsettlement," and Human-Animal Relationships in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace  Part 2: Emotive Histories, Emotional Historiographies  6. Cicero and His Daughter Tullia: Grief and History in a Latin Epistolary Collection  7. "They Could Not Let Her Go with Dry Eyes . . .": Manifesting Emotions in the Encomium Emmae Reginae  8. Worlds Emerge, Worlds Collapse: Traumatic Affect in Medieval Historiography and the Reception of Sturlunga Saga in the Twentieth Century  9. Controlling Female Emotions. Monstrous Births and Maternal Imagination in Iceland  10. Disgust and Parasites in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction  Part 3: Emotions Shaping History  11. The Guilt, the Trial, and the Execution: The Case of the Cross at Cheapside Revisited  12. Love, Actually . . . Pricing Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century Greece  13. Melancholia in Contemporary Spain: Digging Up a Past That Did Not Pass Away  14. Persecutory Anxiety and the Fear of Death as Emotional Qualities of the Cultural Revolution in China  15. Historical Understanding—A Romance of Many Dimensions

O autorze

Rafał Borysławski is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.

Alicja Bemben is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.