Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Scheer, Monique, author.

Title Enthusiasm : emotional practices of conviction in modern Germany / Monique Scheer
Edition First edition
Published Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020
©2020

Copies

Description 1 online resource (256 pages)
Series Emotions in history
Emotions in history.
Contents Introduction: enthusiasm as an emotional practice -- Emotional ideologies: a brief archeology of terms and theories -- Safeguarding interiority: debates over Protestant enthusiasm in nineteenth-century Germany -- Free to follow the feeling: doubt as material practice -- Styles of sincerity: on the morality of performances of enthusiasm -- Awkward enthusiasts: emotionalizing atheism in Berlin -- Conclusion: enchanting conviction: "enthusiasm" as an analytical term
Summary "Enthusiasm seeks to contribute to a culturally and historically nuanced understanding of how emotions secure and ratify the truth of convictions. More than just pure affective intensity, enthusiasm is about something: a certainty, clarity, or truth. Neither as clearly negative as "fanaticism" nor as general as "passion," "enthusiasm" specifically entails belief. For this reason, Enthusiasm takes its starting point in religion, the social arena in which the concept was first debated and to which the term still gestures. Empirically based in modern German Protestantism, where religious emotion is intensely cultivated but also subject to vigorous scrutiny, this book combines historical and ethnographic methods to show how enthusiasm has been negotiated and honed as a practice in Protestant denominations ranging from liberal to charismatic. The nexus of religion and emotion and how it relates to central concepts of modernity such as rationality, knowledge, interiority, and sincerity are key to understanding why moderns are so ambivalent about enthusiasm. Grounded in practice theory, Enthusiasm assumes that emotions are not an affective state we "have" but mind-body activations we "do," having learned to perform them in culturally specific ways. This book shows that, when understood as an emotional practice, enthusiasm has different styles, inflected by historical traditions, social milieus, and knowledge (even ideologies) about emotions and how they work. Finally, Enthusiasm also provides insight into how this feeling works in secular humanism as well as in politics, and why it is so contested as a practice in any context"--Publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Audience Specialized
Notes Description based on online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on December 22, 2020)
Subject Enthusiasm -- Religious aspects.
Protestantism -- Germany -- History -- 19th century
Belief and doubt.
Experience (Religion)
Belief and doubt
Enthusiasm -- Religious aspects
Experience (Religion)
Protestantism
SUBJECT Germany -- Religious life and customs. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85054651
Subject Germany
Genre/Form Electronic books
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780192608918
0192608916
9780191895975
0191895970