Literature & Literary Studies

Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature

by Carolyne Larrington

Description

Over the last twenty-five years, the 'history of emotion' field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature - in particular secular literature - as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences - those who read them or hear them read or performed?

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Reviews

This groundbreaking book explores key methods for investigating emotions in medieval literary texts, proposing innovative approaches, drawing upon psychological theory, 'history of emotions' research and close critical reading, to uncover the emotional repertoire in play in English literary culture between 1200-1500. The extensive introduction lays out medieval philosophical and physiological theorisations of emotion, closely bound up with cognitive processes. Following chapters investigate the changing lexis for emotion in Middle English, examining how translations from French affect the ways in which feelings are imagined. Bodily affect, both involuntary displays and deliberate gesture, is discussed in detail. Performativity - getting things done with emotions - and performance are shown to become interlinked as more sophisticated models of selfhood emerge. Concepts of interiority and the public persona, the self and self-presentation complicate the changing modes through which feeling is expressed. Literary texts are pre-eminently devices for producing emotion of various kinds; the book proposes ways of tracing how authors built techniques for eliciting emotions into their narratives and their effects on their audiences. By the end of the medieval period two vital developments had expanded the possibility for varied and complex emotional expression in texts: the development of the long-form romance, encouraged by the advent of printing, and the concept of auto-fiction: new possibilities emerged for authors to write the emotional self. Through its comprehensive account of emotions in the medieval period, Approaches to emotion explores how literary texts educated and informed their audiences about changing ways to be human in medieval England.

Author Biography

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford

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Bibliographic Information

  • Publisher Manchester University Press
  • Publication Date March 2024
  • Orginal LanguageEnglish
  • ISBN/Identifier 9781526176134 / 1526176130
  • Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
  • FormatPrint PDF
  • Pages320
  • ReadershipGeneral/trade
  • Publish StatusPublished
  • Dimensions216 X 138 mm
  • Biblio NotesDerived from Proprietary 5965
  • SeriesManchester Medieval Literature and Culture
  • Reference Code16265

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