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Title Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture / edited by Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura
Published Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2021
©2021

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I Rewriting discourses of pleasure -- 1 Happy Hamlet -- 2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy -- 3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne -- 4 Pleasure and the 'rustic life' -- II Imagining happy communities -- 5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare -- 6 'My crown is called content': positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare's first tetralogy -- 7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex circle -- 8 Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor -- III Forms, attachment, and ambivalence -- 9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne's devotional poetry -- 10 Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi -- 11 'My heart is satisfied': revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy -- 12 All's Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre -- Afterword -- Index
Summary "What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing."-- Publisher's description
Analysis Shakespeare
affect theory
early modern
embodiment
happiness
history of emotion
humoralism
mirth
renaissance
wellbeing
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (JSTOR platform, viewed August 2, 2023)
Subject European literature -- Renaissance, 1450-1600 -- History and criticism
Emotions in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
European literature -- Renaissance
Emotions in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Literary criticism.
Critiques littéraires.
Form Electronic book
Author Fox, Cora, editor
Irish, Bradley J., editor
Miura, Cassie M., editor
ISBN 9781526137142
1526137143
9781526137159
1526137151