Strange fits of passion : epistemologies of emotion, hume to austen
Pinch, Adela
Strange fits of passion : epistemologies of emotion, hume to austen - Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1997 - viii, 240 p. ; 22 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This book contends that when late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own. It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period's obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience. The book shows how these epistemological dilemmas became gendered by studying a series of extravagantly affective scenes in works by Hume, Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Jane Austen. Making its argument through a provocative conjunction of texts that range across genres and genders and across the divide between the eighteenth century and Romanticism, Strange fits of passion rediscovers the relationship of empiricism to the culture of sentimentality, and the significance of emotion to Romanticism.
9780804736565
Criticism, interpretation
English literature
History
Emotions in literature
820.9353 / PIN
Strange fits of passion : epistemologies of emotion, hume to austen - Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1997 - viii, 240 p. ; 22 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This book contends that when late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own. It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period's obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience. The book shows how these epistemological dilemmas became gendered by studying a series of extravagantly affective scenes in works by Hume, Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Jane Austen. Making its argument through a provocative conjunction of texts that range across genres and genders and across the divide between the eighteenth century and Romanticism, Strange fits of passion rediscovers the relationship of empiricism to the culture of sentimentality, and the significance of emotion to Romanticism.
9780804736565
Criticism, interpretation
English literature
History
Emotions in literature
820.9353 / PIN