1st Edition
Emotions as Engines of History
Seeking to bridge the gap between various approaches to the study of emotions, this volume aims at a multidisciplinary examination of connections between emotions and history and the ways in which these connections have manifested themselves in historiography, cultural, and literary studies. The book offers a selected range of insights into the idea of emotions, affects, and emotionality as driving forces and agents of change in history. The fifteen essays it comprises probe into the emotional motives and dispositions behind both historical phenomena and the ways they were narrated.
Introduction: Emotions as the Engines of Change
Rafał Borysławski and Alicja Bemben
Part 1: Narrating Past Emotions
1. The Wonders of Creation: The Affective Poetics of Alterity in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
Jacek Olesiejko
2. Nice Guys Finish Last: Emotional Leaders and Political Action in Selected Íslendingasögur
Santiago Barreiro and Julián Valle
3. The Deceit of Emotions: Henry More’s Conception of Passion and Religious Polemic in Early Modern England
Zoya Metlitskaya
4. How British Lyric Poetry Came to be Angry After Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips
Michael Joseph
5. Empathy, "Empathic Unsettlement," and Human-Animal Relationships in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Paulina Grzęda
Part 2: Emotive Histories, Emotional Historiographies
6. Cicero and His Daughter Tullia: Grief and History in a Latin Epistolary Collection
Linda McGuire
7. "They Could Not Let Her Go with Dry Eyes . . .": Manifesting Emotions in the Encomium Emmae Reginae
Rafał Borysławski
8. Worlds Emerge, Worlds Collapse: Traumatic Affect in Medieval Historiography and the Reception of Sturlunga Saga in the Twentieth Century
Miriam Mayburd
9. Controlling Female Emotions. Monstrous Births and Maternal Imagination in Iceland
Arngrímur Vídalín
10. Disgust and Parasites in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction
Justyna Jajszczok
Part 3: Emotions Shaping History
11. The Guilt, the Trial, and the Execution: The Case of the Cross at Cheapside Revisited
Jakub Basista
12. Love, Actually . . . Pricing Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century Greece
Dimitra Vassiliadou
13. Melancholia in Contemporary Spain: Digging Up a Past That Did Not Pass Away
Rafael Pérez Baquero
14. Persecutory Anxiety and the Fear of Death as Emotional Qualities of the Cultural Revolution in China
Jun Lu
15. Historical Understanding—A Romance of Many Dimensions
Alicja Bemben
Biography
Rafał Borysławski is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.
Alicja Bemben is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.
