Romanticism and the Emotions

The first essay collection to examine emotion across the span of Romantic literature and thought, in light of new scholarship.

Romanticism and the Emotions offers the first essay collection to examine the recent focus on the importance of emotion in literature within the context of Romanticism. The wide range of authors covered, from Jane Austen to Michael Faraday, including Lord Byron and Immanuel Kant, enables fascinating conclusions to be drawn.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.