Romanticism and the Emotions

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the importance of the emotions in Romantic literature and thought. This collection the first to stress the centrality of the emotions to Romanticism addresses a complex range of issues including the relation of affect to figuration and knowing emotions and the discipline of knowledge the motivational powers of emotion and emotions as a shared ground of meaning. Contributors offer significant new insights on the ways in which a wide range of Romantic writers including Jane Austen William Wordsworth Immanuel Kant Lord Byron Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley Thomas De Quincey and Adam Smith worried about the emotions as a register of human experience. Though varied in scope the essays are united by the argument that the current affective and emotional turn in the humanities benefits from a Romantic scepticism about the relations between language emotion and agency.