Emotions through Literature: Fictional Narratives, Society and the Emotional Self

Description

Engaging with the wide sociological literature on emotions, this book explores the social representation of emotions, their management and their effects by making reference to creative sources. With a specific focus on literary narrative, including the works of figures such as Dante, Austen, Manzoni, Tolstoy and Kundera, the author draws out the capacity of literary works to describe and represent both the external aspects of social relations and the inner motivations of the involved actors. An interdisciplinary study that combines sociology, narratology, philosophy, historical analysis and literary criticism, Emotions through Literature invites us to re-think the role of emotions in sociological analysis, employing literary narratives to give plausible intellectual responses to the double nature of emotions, their being both individual and social. Cover Endorsement Page Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication page Contents 1: By way of introduction: A sociology of emotions through literature 2: Sociology and emotions: An overview 1 Emotions as a concealed object 2 Classical thought on emotions 2.1 Émile Durkheim 2.2 Max Weber 2.3 Georg Simmel 3 Early American sociologists on emotions and sentiments 3.1 Charles Horton Cooley 3.2 Park and Burgess 3.3 Florian Znaniecki 4 The relevance of emotions in contemporary social theory 5 Sketching the features of the sociology of emotions Note 3: Emotions and their history: A sociological perspective 1 Do emotions have a history? 2 Norbert Elias and the civilization of manners 3 William M. Reddy and the navigation of the self 4 Consumerism and emotions 5 A final overview 4: Emotions and literature 1 Literary emotions: are they paradoxical? 2 Literary narratives and emotions 3 An unusual transparency 4 What is specific in literary emotions? 5 The narrative character of emotions 6 Narratives of emotions and literary emotions 5: Action, emotions and emotional control: A reading of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral 1 Puppets, actors or humans? Luigi Pirandello, Alfred Schutz and the sociological homunculus 2 The sociological puppet and emotions 3 Talcott Parsons through Philip Roth’s American Pastoral 4 Action and the mask of reasonableness 5 Seymour Levov and the pain of surface acting 6 The dependable father, and the daughter who is chaos itself 7 Seymour Levov as the tragic hero of solid modernity 6: The emotional crowd 1 The crowd, literature and social theory 2 Negative affects, social contagion and the crowd 3 Émile Zola, Gustave Le Bon and the crowd 4 Manzoni, Smelser and the theory of the emerging norm 5 Brief concluding remarks Notes 7: Envy, social order and social change 1 Envy as a sociological concept 2 Envy. A sentiment and a deadly sin 3 Iago, or the envier in a society in transition 4 Enviers claiming their lost status. The Way We Live Now 5 Uriah Heep or the envy punished 6 Experiencing status change. Verga’s Mastro don Gesualdo and Larsen’s Passing 7 Brief final remarks 8: Of love, its semantic and its social function 1 Love as a syndrome and as a social fact 2 Love as an ideal: courtly love and Dante’s Vita Nova 3 Towards romantic love 4 The complications of love 5 Late-modern love References Index