Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

ISBN-13: 9781009280266 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Richard (University of Hull) Meek

Opis

The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of sympathy in early modern Anglophone literature and culture.

Recenzje

'Sympathy is a key emotion in affect studies and the history of feeling because its changing meanings reveal not just how this particular emotion was experienced and understood, but also how writers have considered the movement of affect more generally from one individual to others. Richard Meek's interdisciplinary analysis of an impressive range of early modern English texts (both literary and non-literary, and both canonical and under-examined) is therefore crucially relevant to historical and contemporary emotion studies. Tracing the semantic shifts in the word 'sympathy' and its imaginative and metaphorical use in the period – from describing a magical affinity or transmission between physical objects and substances in texts of natural philosophy, for instance, to its transpositions denoting compassion or pity in religious texts, to its evaluation as a politically potent and sometimes failed 'fellow-feeling' in dramatic works including King Lear, Meek unravels any simple historical understanding of this emotion's emergence in the eighteenth century. He insists instead that sympathy's widening use and accretion of meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals a growing understanding of this fundamental emotion as intersubjective, as well as both mimetic and willed.' Cora Fox, Arizona State University

Spis treści

Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.