How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term "intimacy" captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of ...shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen show how mutual recognition gives way to the appreciation of varied, nonreciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Yousef offers a compelling account of how philosophical confidence in sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, as well as for literary theorists.
Sex before Sex Bromley, James M; Stockton, Will
02/2013
eBook
What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places?Sex before Sexmakes clear that we cannot simply ...transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays. The contributors confront how our current critical assumptions about definitions of sex restrict our understanding of representations of sexuality in early modern England.
Drawing attention to overlooked forms of sexual activity in early modern culture, from anilingus and interspecies sex to "chin-chucking" and convivial drinking,Sex before Sexoffers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, includingRomeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Paradise Lost, the figure of Lucretia, and pornographic poetry, this collection queries what might constitute sex in the absence of a widely accepted definition and how a historicized concept of sex affects the kinds of arguments that can be made about early modern sexualities.
Contributors: Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Will Fisher, CUNY-Lehman College; Stephen Guy-Bray, U of British Columbia; Melissa J. Jones, Eastern Michigan U; Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College; Nicholas F. Radel, Furman U; Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt U; Christine Varnado, U of Buffalo-SUNY.
First published in 1984, John Hardy's important interpretation of Jane Austen's heroines breaks through the accepted tradition of viewing the author as merely a rational comedienne of manners. He ...argues instead that Jane Austen's greatness lies in her exploration of human relationships through the subtle and original portrayal of her heroines.
Jane Austen's heroines come to enjoy a distinctive relationship with the men they eventually marry. Between her lovers the potential exists for the kind of intimacy that leads to a shared privacy. Austen's recognition of this represents her special insight into what is of central importance in human relationships. Her belief that love and friendship are our only hope of triumphing over solitude, and the character and integrity of her heroines, are the major elements which make Jane Austen's novels so satisfying.
1. Catherine Morland 2. Elinor Dashwood 3. Elizabeth Bennet 4. Fanny Price 5. Emma Woodhouse 6. Anne Elliot
'Very thoughtfully and delicately done, with a refreshing lack of critical clichés ... takes Austen criticism on several important steps' - Birmingham Post
'Illuminating' - Financial Times
'Hardy writes about Austen with feeling and understanding.' - Women's Review of Books
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in ...terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood-and, more importantly, could only understand themselves-through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed-including race, sexuality, the market, and the law-formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments-such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law-as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences-one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Sandro Penna, an understudied Italian poet whose literary corpus is produced
during the end period and eventual fall of Italian fascism, writes Appunti, the second
volume of his major poetic corpus, ...from 1938-49. In it, he explicates a poetic of an
unapologetic, open homoeroticism that allows one to examine the obstacles a translator
faces in considering how one can remain faithful to the original poems and the identity
the poet creates. Keeping in mind theoretical influences informing the creation and
translation of poetry and the political choices inherent therein, my translations of these
poems mediate the content and form in the target text to maintain the importance of the
context in which the originals are written. This thesis and these translations aim to reexamine the importance of Penna as a poet, address the importance of translation in the
establishment of foreign poets, and develop a new perspective in Translation Studies that
considers the interdisciplinary applications of Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Includes bibliography.
Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014.
FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in ...terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world.Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in ...terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers's ambivalences about the idea of an intimate ...nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed coherence. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the dream of Americanness as a relation to anonymous others.
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