Cheerfulness (eBook)

A Literary and Cultural History

Timothy Hampton (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2022
280 Seiten
Zone Books (Verlag)
978-1-942130-62-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: 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.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.5.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: American capitalism • Anecdote • Anguish • Apathy • aphorism • Baruch Spinoza • Bertolt Brecht • Betterment • Biblical paraphrase • Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes) • Catharism • Catullus • Cleanthes • connotation • Copperfield (musical) • critique • daisy buchanan • egotism • Emotion • Equanimity • Essay • ethics • etymology • Eudaimonia • evocation • friar laurence • Friedrich Nietzsche • Frugality • Gargantua and Pantagruel • Generosity • God • god is dead • Good and evil • Health • Henry Crawford • High Spirits (musical) • Hippolyta • Hospitality • How It Happened • Humour • Inbreeding • Jane Austen • Jazz Age • John Claggart • John Donne • John Willoughby • Joke • Julian of Norwich • Lightness (philosophy) • Literature • Metaphor • Metaphysics • Metonymy • Michel de Montaigne • Modernity • Morality • Mr. • Mrs. • narrative • Norman Vincent Peale • optimism • Orison Swett Marden • parable • Parody • petrarch • Philosopher • Philosophy • Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche • piety • Poetry • Protagonist • Pyramus and Thisbe • ragged dick • Ralph Waldo Emerson • religious experience • Return to normalcy • Richard Hooker • Romanticism • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern • Samuel Smiles • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Satire • SCHOLASTICISM • self-love • Self-reliance • seriousness • Slogan • Spirituality • sprezzatura • Struggle (TV series) • Superiority (short story) • Sympathy • Theodor W. Adorno • The Tempest • Thought • Tragedy • Uriah Heep • Utopia • William Shakespeare • Writing
• ISBN-10: 1-942130-62-7 / 1942130627
• ISBN-13: 978-1-942130-62-8 / 9781942130628