Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History

Description

A timely story of a forgotten emotion Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness ― a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit ― functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness ― as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology, Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has never before been systematically traced. Cover Contents Introduction. A Contagion, a Power One: Early Modern Cheerfulness I. Body, Heaven, Home: Cheerful Places II. Among the Cheerful: The Emotional Life of Charity III. Medicine, Manners, and Reading for the Kidneys IV. Shakespeare, or the Politics of Cheer V. Montaigne, or the Cheerful Self Two: Cheerful Economies and Bourgeois Culture VI. Social Virtue, Enlightenment Emotion: Hume and Smith VII. Jane Austen, or Cheer in Time VII. Cheerful Ambition in the Age of Capital: Dickens to Alger IX. Gay Song and Natural Cheer: Milton, Wordsworth Three: Modern Cheerfulness X. The Gay Scientists: Philosophy and Poetry XI. It Is Amazing!: Self-Help and Self-Marketing XII. “Take It, Satch!”: Cheer in Dark Times Conclusion. Cheer in Pandemic Days Acknowledgments Notes Index