GAH 1060 / GAH 3134 The Passions

Here are resources where you can look at some of the current research being done on the history of emotions. This is where you will see information about the latest research and ideas—much of this work isn’t published yet, though there will be links for lists of articles/books/projects that members have published.

Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Barnes, Jonathan. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books, 2012.

Brower, Jeffrey E. and Kevin Guilfoy. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Cuda, Anthony. The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.

Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Downes, Stephanie. Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Eustace, Nicole. 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Eustace, Nicole. Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro, 2008.

Frevert, Ute et al. Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gross, Daniel M., The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Holloway, Sally. The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotion, and Material Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Hultquist, Aleksondra and Chris Mounsey, editors. A Spy on Eliza Haywood: Addresses to a Multifarious Writer. Routledge, 2021.

James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1997.

Kerr, Heather, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, eds. Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Matt, Susan J. Doing Emotions History, edited by Peter N. Stearns, University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Norton, David Fate, and Jacqueline Anne Taylor. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.)  Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Peltonen, Markku. The Cambridge Companion to Bacon. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Plamper, Jan. History of Emotions : an Introduction. Translated by Keith Tribe, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Reddy, William. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, Asia, and Japan 900-1200 CE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

• William M. Reddy’s theory of emotions discusses the connections between cognition and emotion, between culture and emotional expressions. He showcases how his theory of “emotional regimes” and “emotional refuge” can answer how different cultures and societies allow some aspects of emotional expressions to manifest and repress others. These theories show why emotions changing over time and are the catalyst for significant changes in history. This book tests the theories with the history of the French Revolution, where, Reddy argues, sentimentalism became the driving force for emotional liberty. (Redwan Salman)

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.

• Barbara Rosenwein proposes that we all reside within specific emotional communities and that it is within these communities that we conform to certain expressions of how to deal with and express our emotions. By examining texts from the Middle Ages she breaks down the category of emotions through a social lens. (Jaiden Chavis)

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Rosenwein, Barbara H. and Ricardo Cristiani What is the History of Emotions? Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

Saxon, Kirsten T. and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, editors. The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work. University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

Solomon, Robert C. The Passions. 1st ed., Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.

Stearns, Peter N. Shame : a Brief History. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Sullivan, Erin. Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Van Sant, Ann Jessie. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Wack, Mary Frances. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

 

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Charland, Louis C. “‘Moral Undertow and the Passions: Two Challenges for Contemporary Emotion Regulation.” Emotion Review, vol. 3, no. 1, SAGE Publications, Jan. 2011, pp. 83-91, doi:10.1177/1754073910380967.

Dixon, Thomas. “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis.” Emotion Review, vol. 4, no. 4, SAGE Publications, Oct. 2012, pp. 338–44, doi:10.1177/1754073912445814.

• A take on the history of emotions, including links to works of experts such as Barbra Rosenwein, Keith Oatley, and Thomas Dixon, via blog. Offers an alternative angle on the histories of emotion and expression, identifying interviews in which ‘emotion’ is explored. (Semya Andrews)

Dixon, Thomas. “‘Emotion’: One Word, Many Concepts.” Emotion Review, vol. 4, no. 4, SAGE Publications, Sep. 2012, pp. 387–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445826.

Dixon, Thomas. “History in British Tears: Some Reflections on the Anatomy of Modern Emotions.” Lecture delivered at the annual conference of the Netherlands Historical Association, KoninklijkeBibliotheek Den Haag, 4 November 2011. (The bibliography to this paper is FABULOUS for history of Emotion research!)

Eustace, Nicole, et al. “‘AHR’ Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions.” The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, University of Chicago Press, Dec. 2012, pp. 1486–531.

• In ‘The Historical Study of Emotions’, Nicole Eustace and many other authors discuss the study of emotions throughout history. There is a wide range of conversation about accessing emotions of people’s lives from the past. (Sarah McElroy)

Hampton, Timothy. “Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from Galen to Rabelais.” In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. pp. 272-3.

Hultquist, Aleksondra. “Emotion, Affect, and the Eighteenth Century.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 58, no. 3, 2017, pp. 273–80, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671641.

Kronqvist, Camilla. “A Passion for Life: Love and Meaning.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Nordic Wittgenstein Society, 2017, pp. 31–51, doi:10.15845/nwr.v6i1.3424.

Matt, Susan J. “Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out.” Emotion Review, vol. 3, no. 1, SAGE Publications, Jan. 2011, pp. 117–24, doi:10.1177/1754073910384416.

• This article in Emotion Review tracks the ebb and flow of the nature of emotions by analyzing historical and religious movements to produce understanding through the lens of the modern reader’s eye. Susan J. Matt pulls upon research done by experts in the study of emotion such as Peter Stearns, Barbara Rosenwein, and William Reddy to dissect emotion with the intention of exploring the discrepancies of how and why we express our feelings and passions today in comparison with earlier societies. (Madeline Ruley)

Parmisano, Fabian. “Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages—I.” New Blackfriars, vol. 50, no. 591, 1969, pp. 599–608. JSTOR.

• “Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages” is about the social and religious construct around sex marriage and love. The author, Fabian Parmisano, highlights how the ideals of faith determined how one behaved when it came to courtship and then marriage. He also explains components of pleasure and pain that correlate to one’s passions on this topic. (Alexa Palmerini)

Porter, Jean. “Responsibility, Passion, and Sin: A Reassessment of Abelard’s Ethics.” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 28, no. 3, Blackwell Publishers Inc, 2000, pp. 367–94, https://doi.org/10.1111/0384-9694.00054.

Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Philosophy, vol. 57, no. 220, Cambridge University Press, Jan. 1982, pp. 159–72, doi:10.1017/S0031819100050749.

Rosenwein, Barabara. “Worry about Emotions in History.” Review-Essay. American Historical Review June (2002), pp. 821-845.

Shouse, Eric. "Feeling, Emotion,  Affect." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 11 Oct. 2014.

Strier, Richard. “Against the Rule of Passion: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert.” In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 2004. 23-42.

Thompson, Helen. “Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton's The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood's Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2002, pp. 195-214.

• Thompson analyzes and makes connections between two large concepts such as feminine consistency and materialism through two texts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The Ephesian Matron and Fantomina. It attempts to recover the formal and thematic resources with which Haywood's romance resolves patriarchal contradiction through characterization. (Laina Brown)

Trigg, Stephanie. “Emotional Histories: Beyond the Personalization of the Past or the Abstraction of Affect Theory.” Exemplaria, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3-15, doi: 10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000043.